A Lovely And A Fearful Thing. Alas! The Love Of Women! By William Martin.

Deceit, lust, loss, guilt, and revenge are all part of Matthew Calhoun’s acutely observed and deeply thoughtful account of the Harrisons, the richest and most prominent, but hardly the most upstanding, family in the small south Georgia town of Thornhurst. At the center of the story, set in the recent past, is the somewhat suspicious death of golden boy Donnie Harrison, and revolving around that death are the romantic entanglements of his gorgeous widow, of his domineering father, and of his PhD aunt from Boston, a former ‘60s hippie and family embarrassment. In each of these entanglements the love of women is indeed, as Lord Byron puts it, “a lovely and a fearful thing.