High Water

Rating:
Summary: fast-paced amateur sleuth mystery
Review: After leaving the marines due to an exercise scandal leaving seven soldiers dead, former drill Sergeant Fielding Smallwood accompanied by his family relocates in Beaufort, South Carolina. Fielding almost immediately starts an affair with a local widow even as his wife Lena is dying. His adult children detest Fielding, who has treated his family like he did his units, but feels they are his failures. His son Hank returns home after doing the worst deed by going AWOL two years ago. His youngest daughter Claire is a loser divorcee with three children. His other son Ashby is an unacceptable gay. Finally, Fielding blames all his trouble on his fourth child Georgie.

They become even angrier with him when, without consulting his four adult children, Fielding has his spouse taken off life-support. As the children commiserate with one another, they all wish Fielding was dead. They got what they asked for as someone murders the former marine. Law enforcement believes that one or more of his chidlren committed the crime with Claire being the one arrested. This leaves it up to Georgie to uncover the truth because she cannot accept that brittle Claire had the iron to kill anyone.

HIGH WATER is more than just a fast-paced amateur sleuth mystery. The story line focuses on a dysfunctional southern family struggling with self-images and interrelationships, of which none of the siblings seem capable of maintaining. The story line is fast-paced as expected from a Lynn Hightower tale, but the plot clearly belongs to the Smallwood family, as the author strips their souls bare for the audience to understand them inside a strong mystery.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful but very sad
Review: Don't read this book if you're looking for a cheer-up. Hightower writes about yet another dysfunctional southern family. The heroine, Georgie, has escaped to her own antique shop; her sister is charmingly in her own world; her brother is gay. Georgie had a baby at the age of sixteen, a son who is now sixteen himself, and who has disappeared for the last two years.

The family comes together after their mother dies under mysterious circumstances and Georgie suspects their father was responsible. Their father, while not typically abusive, could be cruel; his life has been directed by a stint in the Marine Corps, where he met men who would influence the rest of his life.

Although the story is a suspenseful page-turner, we don't learn the story until the last few pages, when everything comes together. We get a sense of "Yes, now it all makes sense."
Yet in the end three people are dead and two were innocent of anything except getting caught up too deeply in the family struggles. One was implicated, falsely, in a murder.

Among novels of dysfunctional families and psychological suspense, High Water ranks as one of the best. Unfortunately, I had just picked up Sacrament of Lies by Elizabeth Dewberry, which has a similar theme -- heroine wondering if father killed mother -- but is not as plausible, deep or well-written. After reading the two in sequence, I began to wonder if this isn't some new sub-genre, just as child and wife abuse was a theme a few years ago.
If you have to choose, read this one.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent murder mystery
Review: Excuse me, but aren't most all families somewhat dysfunctional? That's what makes Southern writers so intriguing and all of us Southerners so fascinating....our shameless ability to admit to and share our dysfunction with the world.

I loved this bittersweet, melancholy tale of a family in crisis. Hightower has the basics of family dynamics down to an art in this tale of three siblings who have to deal with the apparent suicide of their mother and the murder of their mean, controlling, ex-military father. I read this one in a day and loved the surprise ending. I highly recommend all of Hightower's books!

Rating:
Summary: Depressing
Review: I bought this book thinking it was the next in the Sonora Blair series. The only reason I finished it is because I can't bring myself not to finish a book I've started.

What was apparently supposed to be "suspense" came across as a very poor effort at writing literary fiction. The book had a very depressing tone to it, and I read it more to get through it and be done with it than because I was enjoying it.

Stick with the Sonora Blair series -- this one really isn't entertainment and takes a whole lot of effort just to read.

Rating:
Summary: Really liked it!
Review: I love Lynn Hightower's writing. She is one of my most favorite writers. After reading Debt Collector I couldn't wait for another "Senora" book but I really liked High Water.
High Water is high-grade entertainment from beginning to the end. Another great story from Ms. Hightower!

Rating:
Summary: Really liked it!
Review: I was initially disappointed to find that I had not purchased a Sonora Blair novel, but immediately was taken in by the easy writing style of Lynn Hightower. I love her short chapters, twists and turns, and interesting characters. Miss Hightower never lets you down at the end of her books and I was shocked as I read the last chapter. WOW.

Rating:
Summary: Wow. What a powerful book.
Review: I'm a big fan of the Sonora Blair books, and I live in Cincinnati where they are set, so I was doubly concerned that Lynn Hightower's newest book was not a Sonora Blair book.

Wow, were my socks knocked off by this book! A dysfunctional Southern family could be such a cliche or very trite, but Hightower pulls it off without going either way. Her characters have depth and humanity -- and you find yourself really rooting for them. Even when that means for them to do something really messed up <grin>.

High Water takes Hightower from a formidable mystery author to a serious character-driven author with a mystery involved (think James Lee Burke). If you're hesitant because you love the Blair books, go ahead and read High Water. If you haven't read any of Hightower's previous books, this one will hook you on her writing, and you can go back and read the Sonora Blair books.

Rating:
Summary: Just your typical Southern family intrigue?
Review: If this novel was intended to be a murder mystery, it surely took long enough to reach that point. For the most part, it was just mundane life of an unwed mother with a teenage son who ran away (for awhile), a sister living in a dream world, and a gay brother plus an abusive father who may have killed their mother for her money.

The plots came thick in a plodding way, hard to get through, with some unsavory characters with criminal pasts and suicide galore. This woman was as interested in getting involved with a strange stranger -- after all these years.

The only redeeming part of this sordid tale was finally learning who the father of her illegitimate son was, and why she had not married him. As in so many small towns of the South, the families get intermingled, as her lover's father had been her mother's lover. Read it to believe it.

The three siblings meet at an abandoned lighthouse which was in bad repair, as they had as youngsters. This book was loaded with beer talk and roughnecks at the local roadhouse where a nosey waitress heard something she should have ignored. Her interference cost this family almost all of the inheritance from the parents (both who died with days of each other under suspicious circumstances) and prompted the rejected brother to stage his own demise so they could use his life insurance.

The really 'bad' character had not died when he was supposed to, but it is his violent death at the end of the book which leaves the reader feeling she/he had been down among the lowlifes of this world.

Why she wrote this (unless it was biographical and she needed to get it out of her system) is beyond the realm of reasoning. I personally was glad to be rid of the whole affair.

This is as far from the scholarly writing of Beverly Swerling as you could possibly get. It is so mundane, dysfunctional, and modern in its subject matter.

Murder, unwed motherhood, gay brother, runaway son (shall I go on?) are just some of the sordidness in this account of an abusive father, unfaithful mother, and a lighthouse rendevous. The mother is found dead with a possible overdose of Xanax but has a mysterious bruise for which there is no plausible reason. Then the father is found dead in the abandoned, unsafe lighthouse where the siblings meet even after they are grown -- and grown apart.

The mother has inherited a fine home and money; the father is a banker. So, the rich don't exactly lead perfect lives or produce perfect children.

This story has little redeeming quality; instead of a 'good read' you come away feeling abused mentally. Miss Hightower may live in Tennessee, but thank goodness she bases it elsewhere. We don't have lighthouses in Tennessee, but family conflict galore, ending in murder. It's always been that way here.

Rating:
Summary: A refreshing twist on the genre
Review: Lynn Hightower has written a number of books of police / detective fiction. This book is a departure from that regime in that the protagonists are siblings who are suddenly confronted with the death, possibly murder, or their mother and father. This gives decidedly a different colour to the murder story. Interwoven with the mystery are the threads of the family dynamics between the siblings and that of the main character's runaway son.

In all, this is a well written book, and it fully kept my attention. I just wish Hightower had handled the ending slightly differently.