Lying with the Dead : A Novel

SUMMARY: In this novel, Greek tragedy meets a dysfunctional family from Maryland, revealing how time and place matter little when it comes to the implacable logic of the darkest human emotions. The family matriarch–half Medea, half Clytemnestra–calls home her three children, who take turns narrating this story, for a final, bedside reunion. There’s the firstborn, Maury, who has Asperger’s, and whose poetic and offbeat reasoning is both endearing and heartbreaking; Candy, his sister, who takes care of their mother, having renounced marrying the man she loves; and Quinn, the wonder boy who left his white trash background to become a successful actor in London. Mother still lives in the house where she made their lives miserable as children and where their father was murdered–a crime for which Maury went to jail as a teenager. Once the family is reassembled in the childhood home, the pieces of a somber puzzle come together over brilliant and witty exchanges showing Irish humor at its best. Mewshaw invites us into the heart of a family dynamic, at times almost too close for comfort, exploding prejudices about murder and family love.