One day Scott notices something: the lights in the empty house next door go off at exactly eleven each night. Although it’s almost certainly a timer Scott becomes obsessed, and eventually breaks in. This small transgression invigorates him, and soon he talks his unhappy wife into joining him in his new-found passion. The pair gets drunk and go over to the house together, and in a moment of passion, make a disturbing discovery that sets off a chain reaction of horrific discoveries about Victor, Elise, and Carmelita, the “Winter Girl”of the title. There is not much more I can say about the book without dropping a ton of spoilers, but I can tell you that if the first part the story of this couple's life was bad the second half is a disturbing and compelling train wreck.
As unlikeable as they are at first, each and every character become worse and worse, until you feel like you are caught up in a nest of vipers. Mr. Marinovich’s skill is that in spite of this, or just maybe because of it, the story becomes more and more riveting. As the revelations come faster and faster, and get progressively worse you know that there is no way that this story can end well, but by then you are caught up in the narrative flow, very much like the characters themselves, and I was looking to see just how bad things were going to get. And trust me, they get real, real bad. There are a lot of coincidences that fall just the right, (or wrong), way near the end, and it was a bit distressing to read a book in which just about every single person is despicable, but I just kept turning the pages, which earns Mr. Marinovich a serious tip of my cap.
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July 2020
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