Security
A Novel
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
There isn't much crime in Stoneleigh, Massachusetts. It's a college town, a mountain getaway for the quietly rich,
where the average burglar alarm is set off by foraging wildlife. So when Edward Inman, the owner of Stoneleigh Sentinel, gets a latenight false alarm from the home of Doyle Cutler, one of his wealthiest clients, Edward thinks nothing of it—not until a local student, Mary Steckl, claims that she was sexually assaulted at Cutler's house.
Edward soon finds himself drawn to Mary's story, even though the rest of the town doubts her, including his wife, a rising politician who has made security the platform of her mayoral campaign. While homework from a creative writing class is leaked as evidence of a dark secret between Mary and her father, Edward's investigations lead him to his old girlfriend, Kathryn Williams, whose teenage son may hold the key to the truth about that night.
From the author of Human Capital, Security is a timely, wry, and riveting story of adults and children, secret lives and civic
culture, suspicion and sexual hysteria. It confirms Stephen Amidon as a master of the art and one of the foremost chroniclers of American life today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An anatomist of contemporary American anomie, Amidon (Human Capital) follows, in this skillfully executed if not quite devastating novel, the serpentine events surrounding an alleged sexual assault in a sleepy Massachusetts college town. Edward Inman runs a security company and one night is called to the mansion of Doyle Cutler, a wealthy client. Later, college student Mary Steckl accuses Cutler of sexually abusing her at his home that evening. The police and the locals assume she's covering for her father, a widower whose heavy drinking has gotten him in trouble with the law before. Mary's plight quickly envelops others, including her classmate, Angela, who is sleeping with her English professor, a guest at the Cutler mansion on the night in question; Kathryn, a divorc e who embarks on an affair with an old love whose wife is running for mayor; and Conor, Kathryn's troubled son and the only witness to what really happened to Mary. The reader stands by for the human catastrophe that will inevitably ensue, but despite its nuanced depiction of smalltown life and propulsive plotting, the novel fails to achieve a truly tragic dimension.
