Dec 29 2008
Amagansett by Mark Mills - a review
I was at home recently for the holidays and saw this book on the coffee table so I picked it up and began to read. Amagansett by Mark Mills was everything that I expected from a first mystery novel by a British screenplay writer turned author.
This novel takes place on the East End of Long Island, on the South shore, just after the second World War. It begins with two fishermen netting the dead body of one of the rich, summer folk - a young woman. Conrad Labarde is shocked to find Lillian Wallace in his net but does a masterful job hiding that shock initially. An autopsy is conducted and what was thought to be a tragic accident in an unpredictable ocean begins to look more and more like murder. Deputy Chief Tom Hollis then becomes involved and conducts his own investigation, suspecting Ms. Wallace’s former fiancee - Justin Penrose and her amibitious brother Manfred Wallace - of the homicide. Their motive: covering up an unsolved hit and run accident from the previous year.
This was an easy read. There were brief spurts where Mills had no dialogue but the book was comprised mostly of dialog. Through that conversation, we learn the history of the characters and of the social tensions that exist between the local fishermen, who have to share their homes and livelihood with the wealthy people that flock out to the Hamptons in the summer. We also learn a little bit of the history of the South Fork of Long Island from Montauk through the Hamptons. What was fascinating for me was that I could imagine the locations exactly because I grew up there and that made the book a little more entertaining for me than it perhaps would have been otherwise. The prose was nothing to get excited about quite frankly. In fact, it tended to ramble at parts and lacked consistency. It’s hard to tell if this was because of poor writing or poor editing. It’s a mystery novel after all and it’s nothing all that spectacular, although it’s a pretty decent first novel.
The characters are stereotypes and predictable. They don’t really learn much about themselves over the course of the book and Mill’s doesn’t really develop them as much as I would like. While they’re not flat, they’re not altogether three-dimensional either - they are caught in that limbo world in between. I could deal with them, especially since we’re meeting them in the context of a thriller/mystery where the whole point is solving the crime not character epiphanies necessarily. There were none of those exciting moments that lead readers to remark ” I couldn’t put the book down for fear I’d miss something.”
Generally, this was an interesting book and a pretty good first shot.
