Matt Marinovich's The Winter Girl is a brief, chilling story of boredom's path to crime and secrets uncovered.
Scott and Elise have decamped from New York City to the Hamptons, where they are staying at Elise's father Victor's house in unaccustomed splendor while he dies in the hospital of cancer. Their lives have been put on hold as Elise spends her days visiting with Victor and Scott mopes around the house, drinking Victor's liquor cabinet dry. His career as a photographer has fallen off, although he still takes his camera out to the lake some days. His marriage to Elise is failing, for reasons that are more a natural drift than explicitly detailed.
In his boredom, Scott starts watching the house next door, which clearly has been emptied for the winter. Every night he watches the light turn off on its timer at 11 p.m. He grows a little obsessed, so the next move is clear: while Elise is at the hospital one day, he breaks in, just to have a look around. This starts a string of increasingly criminal and disturbing thoughts and actions, and begins to unravel a long-guarded tangle of secrets.
Told in Scott's first-person perspective, The Winter Girl has a strikingly unsettling tone and moody, atmospheric setting. Marinovich (Strange Skies) offers an unnerving and entertaining story. However, as the revelations mount, their pacing feels a bit rushed. On the whole, though, the experience is exhilarating, if a little leeway is allowed for accelerating surprises. And the dramatic denouement leaves the reader eager for more. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia