A close-knit but completely unstrung family is at the volcanic core of Rachel Joyce's dastardly, dark, and traumatic escapade, The Homemade God. The Kemps--76-year-old artist, patriarch, and widower, Vic, and his four adult children--Netta, Susan, Gustav, and Iris--are sweltering from more than just the historic 2015 European heat wave and its incessant, intolerable "water shortages and wild fires."
Vic gathers them at the Singing Wok in central London and announces he has decided to marry "the love of [his] life," 27-year-old Bella-Mae Gonzales, whom he met online six weeks ago. He intends to live in eternal bliss with her on his island estate on Lake Orta, Italy, where he'll work on his "big new painting."
His children are understandably suspicious and certain that the enigmatic Bella-Mae is a grifter after Vic's money. She serves him herbal teas that lead to "drastic weight loss." She's invisible on the Internet, and her face is hidden by a veil in the photo that Vic sends. Bella "calls herself an artist," but Vic's children "can't find any evidence of her paintings." Their concerns prove tragic after Vic drowns in the misty lake.
Joyce cleverly doles out specifics about Vic's suspicious death (including a detailed autopsy) that cloud the novel with the thin veil of a domestic thriller, but family dynamics dominate. During a calamitous summer that "divided each of them from their old lives so irreparably," the children sift through clues to discover the unvarnished mystery of Bella-Mae. Art, loss, grief, and sibling sturm und drang bump up against long-ago lies and deeply hidden secrets until novel's "awe-inspiring and unstoppable" conclusion. --Robert Allen Papinchak, freelance book critic