He is recently separated from his wife, Tina, and his book isn’t selling well. Like Margaret, Wechsler is lonely - even if spotted with a blonde in biking shorts/Spandex top/no bra. Not unrelated to the marital atrophy is Margaret’s attraction to local author George Wechsler, whose bull mastiff, Feldman, is the first dog down, discovered by Margaret while walking her boisterous black lab, Binx, through Baldwin Park. And isn’t Bill admiring his daughter’s friend, Hannah, with “skin so pure, eyes so clear”? Her marriage is getting away from her, despite weekly counseling sessions. overly sensitive.” She is a former teacher, now housewife and mom, whose middle-schooler, Julia, “her sad skinny child,” is a full-time worry. Conveniently, next door lives Margaret Downing, unhappy wife to investment planner Bill, who feels increasingly allergic to the wife he once found fetching.īerne artfully portrays Margaret as a pill, but a sympathetic one, “apprehensive, fretful. “A small, portly black woman in an orange turban,” she pops up to eavesdrop and analyze, arriving as dogs are dying. Taking notes on a sampling of the population is sociocultural anthropologist Clarice Watkins, who had received “high praise, and tenure, for her study of the effects of global destabilization on urban matriarchal structures, based on her fieldwork” in Detroit and Mexico City.

Yet someone is poisoning the town’s dogs, a crime very likely prompted by an off-leash proposal that is dividing the village’s pro- and anti-dog forces. Shouldn’t a town that’s No. 6 on the Wall Street Journal’s list of Twenty Best Places to Live in America be idyllic? Then why is fictional Littlefield, Mass., the setting of Orange Prize-winner Suzanne Berne’s fourth novel, crime- and angst-ridden? Lucky for us, much is roiling under its leafy trees, inside its fine public schools and Victorian houses, home to 1,146 psychotherapists and 679 psychiatrists.

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