Family secrets and secrets of the heart are the driving force of Liza Klausmann's Tigers in Red Weather, a multilayered debut novel tracing the lives of two women over three decades. As World War II draws to a close, Bostonian cousins Nick and Helena--two very different women--are parting ways to get married. Nick marries her longtime love and war hero Hughes, while Helena marries Avery, an aspiring filmmaker in Hollywood. Yet the women remain bound together by shared memories of the Tiger House, the family cottage in Martha's Vineyard where they spent childhood summers before the war. As their lives begin to unravel, the Tiger House comes to represent their only place of refuge--until a brutal murder illustrates just how fragile that refuge truly is.
Tigers in Red Weather is structured like an onion, an exercise in controlled revelation. It is only through Klaussmann's gradual unfolding that the reader learns the reason for Hughes's emotional withdrawal from Nick soon after they were married and the twisted contours of Helena's marriage to a man who manipulates her through pill addiction. And while Nick gives every appearance of being the perfect wife, she, too, is concealing her share of secrets. Each character views the same occurrences through the lens of their own individual experience and psyche--highlighting the intense subjectivity of experience, and how difficult it can be to see the world from someone else's perspective. It is through this difficulty that relationships in the novel become tangled, even mutilated past recognition.
As Nick's daughter Daisy and Helena's son Ed mature and take their places in the drama, they become caught up in the dark secrets of their parents, suffering irrevocable damage as a result. When Daisy and Ed discover the body of a murdered woman, the incident is symbolic of the inability of the adults in their lives to shield them from the ugliness that lurks beneath their mannered façade. Not even the idyllic beauty of Martha's Vineyard can protect the family from the choices that will be their undoing.
Klaussman has produced a suspenseful story that is by turns a mystery, an examination of a marriage and an exploration of the possibly fatal consequences of self-deception. --Ilana Teitelbaum, book reviewer at the Huffington Post
Shelf Talker: A suspenseful debut novel set partially in Martha's Vineyard and centered on dark family secrets, a brutal murder and the effects of both on the next generation.