Open Water : A Novel

In Open Water, Maria Flook explores the charged and eerie shoreline of Newport, Rhode Island, where Willis Pratt squanders his days running small cons. But his heart�s not in it�he�s obsessed with fishing boat tragedies from his childhood and with Holly, a pretty new neighbor who is charged with arson. Their romance is interrupted when Willis is called home to care for his dying step-mother, Rennie, whose biological son wants to place her in a care facility. Willis is determined to guarantee his stepmother the death she desires, but when he arrives, Rennie sees that it is he who needs caring for�Willis quickly gets hooked on her prescription morphine. This is Maria Flook�s natural ground, a harsh and sensual terrain where family debt and carnal knowledge intersect. A fierce wit and an unrelenting vision earned her first novel, Family Night , a Special Citation from the PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation, and the New York Times praised it for �a spare, subtle, ethereal, and erotic style,� calling her gifts �extravagant and apparent on every page.� Open Water is a ringing confirmation of Maria Flook�s remarkable talent. Caught up in the novel�s unremitting current, its characters are propelled to a resolution that no one left on shore could have imagined. An unusual triangle. One protagonist is a young sailor discharged from the Navy for stealing. The second is his stepmother, who has cancer and introduces him to drugs. The third is a neighbor, on probation for trying to kill her husband, with whom the sailor has an affair