The Throat

Tim Underhill, novelist and Vietnam veteran, is called home to Millhaven by an old comrade: John Ransom's wife has been attacked and left comatose, and beside her the assailant wrote two words that empty forty years of the town's history onto the floor. Blue Rose. That was the signature of Millhaven's unsolved murder spree of the 1950s, the case that broke a detective, convicted a probably innocent man, and killed, among others, Tim's own sister April, the wound his whole writing life circles.

What follows is the least conventional serial killer novel of its era: a detective story where the detection is memory. Underhill and his friend Tom Pasmore, a reclusive genius of the armchair school, dig through the town's layers, the fifties murders, the hospital where something else happened, Vietnam, whose horrors keep proving continuous with the ones at home, and the new killings that shadow the investigation itself. Straub plays fair with the mystery, and the solutions, there are several, each one under the last, arrive with real shock; but the book's power is the excavation, a narrator taking his own past apart to find where the violence actually started, and discovering how much of what he remembered was built to protect him.

It stands alone, though readers of Koko and Mystery will find their sunken cities here.

Around six hundred and fifty pages, dense and patient.

Best for readers who want the crime novel raised to full literary pressure, where solving the murders and understanding a life are the same work.