Adam Ross will be at Off Square Books to read and sign copies of Mr. Peanut.
One of the most compelling and surprising books I've encountered in many years is a first novel by Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut, the primary theme of which is the darkest and stormiest side of marriage. Opening with the brutal murder of a woman, possibly committed by her husband, the story soon spins to the three detectives on the case, two whose respective marriages reveal their own certain criminal crevasses, and then to the third, senior consulting detective, who turns out to be none other than Dr. Sam Sheppard. As in Sam Sheppard, the physician, whose conviction for murdering his wife on July 4, 1954, was overturned ten years later, the case upon which many believe the television series and movie by the same name, The Fugitive, was based, as well as that of another film, The Shawshank Redemption. A racing police procedural and a creepily penetrating examination of uxoricide, a word (I recently learned from my often frighteningly smart wife) that means "the killing of a wife by her husband," you will not want to put Mr. Peanut down, nor soon go to sleep with both eyes shut. Come help us welcome Adam Ross and his freak of a novel on June 29. RH