From Booklist
In an understated tour de force, Cody takes the reader into the mind of a mentally ill man who may have murdered his wife. Once a teacher of history and literature at a private high school in Boston who inspired boys with Whitman, Earl Madden–obsessed with serial killers, whose true accounts are threaded throughout the book–is in a mental hospital, being asked about his wife, Joan. Did she leave him–as Earl himself would have done–or did she die at his hands? Earl’s first-person account goes back to his childhood, during which he saw his father institutionalized and was the victim of a neighbor woman’s erratic anger, on to his hearing voices that demean him and practicing self-mutilation. Cody, a former addict and mental patient, knows whereof he writes, and there are some echoes of his three earlier well-received novels here. But it is the consummate skill that he brings to his experience that makes this account of mental illness, with its lucid prose, as astonishing as it is frightening. Michele Leber
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