The Whaleboat House
by Mark Mills
Harper Perennial $108
It's July 1947, and Conrad Labarde and Rollo Kemp are fishing in the waters off the south coast of Long Island when the body of a young, beautiful woman is caught in their nets. East Hampton Deputy Police Chief Tom Hollis suspects the woman was murdered less than a day earlier. He soon finds out that her name is Lillian Wallace and that she comes from a wealthy family of Wall Street brokers. The fisherman Conrad is behaving suspiciously. Tom's personal life is in disarray, after his wife ran off with an artist and asked for a divorce. Mills captures the open seas once full of whaling boats, as well as the cloying parochialism of a village where wealthy holiday-makers live uncomfortably next to residents.