Red Leaves: A Novel [Paperback]

I love most of Cook's books, and his ability to weave two stories in one book, simultaneously, is impressive. His stories are always page-turners, however, Red Leaves is like a diet version of Cook. Less calories but also less flavor.

There are several flaws:

1. Neither the parents nor the babysitter looked in on the little girl.

2. If Keith was such a sulky, suspicious boy, WHY did the parents ever trust him to babysit?

3. The real kidnapper leaves cigarette butts outside the victim's window and that doesn't immediately solve the case?

I finished the book in 2 sittings. It was interesting, hence the 3 stars, but this story was just too implausible. It is not Cook at his best. The characters are simply dull. You can't sympathize with the accused. You can't even feel bad about all the unecessary injustices because the story is just not as convincing as the drama it unfolds could be.

From Red Leaves:

"Here is the illusion--a normal day predicts a normal tomorrow and each day is not a brand-new spin of the wheel, our lives not lived at the whim of Lady Luck."

Yes, how often to we pass accidents, observe incidents that just missed us, could have involved us, but did not.

"Suspicion is an acid, that's one thing I know. Everything it touches it corrodes. It eats through the smooth, glistening surface of things and the mark it leaves is indelible. Late one night I watch a rerun of the movie Alien."

"In one scene, the alien bleeds a liquid so corrosive it immediately eats through first one floor of the space ship, then another and another. And I thought, it's like that, suspicion, it has nowhere to go but down through level after level of old trusts and long devotions. Its direction of always toward the bottom."

What a beautiful job the author does of building suspicion. When I first started reading it, I thought I knew where the author was headed. This, despite the superb blurbs for this particular book from Harlan Coben, Peter Straub, Susan Issacs, and Joyce Carol Oates.

So, I says to myself, the book cannot possibly be headed where it looks like it is headed. This is a master of misdirection. So, to experiment, about a quarter of the way through, I wrote down where it naturally looked like it was going, along with where a savvy reader might second-guess it to be going. Then, about three-quarters of the way through, I wrote down where I thought it was going then.

I was wrong all the way around, and delighted to be wrong. I did not know until the end exactly what would come at the end.

Harlan Coben called RED LEAVES "one of the best books you will read this year--gripping, beautifully written, haunting, surprising, and devastating. Thomas H. Cook has long been one of my favorite writers. RED LEAVES will show you why."

Peter Straub says, "Thomas Cook writes like a wounded angel, and RED LEAVES is one of his masterworks. Sorrow, suspicion, fear, and forgiveness hang suspended over an almost unbearably increasing tension."

Interesting is Cook's choice of epigraph, which is from Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn's "Visiting The Master."

In Dunn's poem, the would-be writer goes to the master again and again to learn the secrets of writing a good book. The master tells him again and again that there are no secrets but that "A good woman is hard to keep. Oh, return to zero, the master said. Use what's lying around the house. Make it simple and sad."

The author not only made it simple and sad, he made it wise and haunting and brilliant.

The entire atmosphere of Red Leaves by Thomas Cook is depressing. While Eric and Meredith's teen-aged son, Keith, is babysitting for a little girl, the little girl disappears. Suspicion immediately falls upon Keith and in what is probably the saddest part of the book, rather than receiving the love and support of his parents, he has to face their suspicion as well as that of everyone else. Oh sure, they do the right things-- they bring in a lawyer, they mouth the right words to the police, but they don't REALLY believe that their son is not guilty of what he is accused.

Under the pressure of the investigation, the family slowly deteriorates as Eric stops trusting Meredith and vice versa. Eric and Meredith are not particularly likeable people, and I can't say for sure whether Keith is likeable or not since Cook portrays him so intently as a sullen teen-aged boy.

There are several surprise twists at the end of the book, as well as a few holes in the plot-- who WAS driving the car that brought Keith home the night of the babysitting, and how was the little girl spirited out of the house without anybody's knowledge? However, it was a book that was impossible to put down.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 50 reviews  4.2 out of 5 stars