CURRENT PROJECT
BLACK AUGUST, a mystery set in Lake Como, Italy, and Austin, Texas, appears in 2012.
He and his friends were on Lake Como again.
They had been coming to the Villa Cappaletti for seven years. A few spats had occurred, but the six men remained compatible -- five of the six played golf together -- and they were all resilient, good humored, and with considerable energies as they drifted into their middle years.
Yet they really didn't know each other.
That summer Harry took an interest in their relationships as he hadn't done before. It was as if he had waked up from a long sleep to study them. Men, he usually supposed, thought in terms of projects -- with a few impersonal stories told to one another along the way -- while women were more often the ones who analyzed interactions and fretted over who thought what about whom. But then Harry began to think about them, the men and women alike. Among other revelations, he found that he didn't completely know his own wife.
All of this because of the August murders.
Each August for years and years, he learned during this visit, some child went missing around the lake. Sometimes the body was quickly discovered, sometimes not. They were little girls around eight or nine years old.
This was the summer Harry began to suspect that one of his own group might be responsible.
