BREAKHEART HILL is Ben Wade’s story of love gone awry in small town Alabama. Wade is a middle-aged doctor in the present day looking back on his teenage years. When he was a highschooler aching to escape the town and the life path it represented. Until Kelli Troy moved to town from ‘up north’. First Kelli became his friend then something more. But when she is attacked one summer afternoon on the book’s eponymous Breakheart Hill, a place with a tragic history before the events of 1962, Kelli’s is not the only life destroyed.

I loved everything about this book. Absolutely everything.

The setting is beautifully depicted. And not just because it shows some of the things I expected based on my extremely limited knowledge of the state but because it shows so much more. I think the town Cook has created is fictional (there is a Choctaw county but does not appear to be an actual town with that name) but it will exist in my imagination forever now. I feel like I could make my way from Ben’s house to where his father’s grocery store stood to the old high school. And I would know the people – then and now – and where each fit into the scheme of things. I’m normally quite terrified of even the idea of small town life but here it is depicted in a way that makes me at least appreciative if not a little envious. Much like Kelli, who has moved from Baltimore

“It’s taught me that basically every place has the whole world in it.” Kelli said. “Everything that happens happens everywhere”. She thought a moment longer then added, “But maybe in a small place, a slower place, you can see it better.”

As far as storytelling goes the book is perfect. From the outset we know that Ben is somehow involved in what happened to Kelli. He alludes to the fact himself and his best friend of 30 years keeps niggling away at the subject over the course of their shared lives. But any punishment Ben has incurred, such as returning to Choctaw after finishing medical school and being the best local doctor he could possibly be, is self-imposed. This ‘what really happened’ plot would probably have been enough to maintain my attention but there is more. There’s all the ripples that can be traced to what happened back then. Bad marriages, accidental deaths, missed opportunities. Lives half-lived and some not lived at all. Cook teases all of this out at just the right pace so the book feels like a collection of genuine, interesting surprises but not a jumble of shocks designed for nothing more than their heart-thumping value. It’s a book that prompts lots of “ah, now I see“s rather than “what the heck was that“s. Even the ending is satisfying which is, these days, a rarity.

Like the place, the characters here live and breathe. No one is just a trait. A jock or a racist or a nerd or a popular girl. Everyone has multiple facets to their personality which sometimes confirms what we already believe and sometimes surprises. I often fall in love with a single character in a book but here it’s more that I loved the collective that Cook introduced me too. He nails the teenagers who feel everything so intensely and, to their minds, for the first time in human history. Who hasn’t thought they were the first to feel a particular kind of love or anger or sadness? But he nails the adults too. Those who’ve coped with the upheavals of life, those who haven’t. Those who haven’t needed to. All of them are very, very real.

Finally the book doesn’t shy away from exploring some difficult themes and ideas. Most of it takes place in the American south in the 60’s and it would be almost absurd if it didn’t in some way look at race. So it does but in a way that manages not to be heavy handed yet remain quite thought provoking. There are other themes too. Friendship. Guilt. Reflection. All deftly handled.

Which is all a long-winded way of expanding upon my original point. I loved absolutely everything about this book.

An excellent suspense novel where love is central theme and Cook has been able to add believable characters around it, how their lives spiral out of control when a stray remark born out of hate changes everything in poetic,literary,atmospheric prose. A small town and high school life told through memories of various characters with needle of suspicion shifting from character to character. ( )

Era un verano espléndido. Un verano que parecía eterno. Sin embargo en medio de aquella belleza, una serpiente se introdujo en el paraíso sin que nadie lo percibiera. Todavía hoy persisten las dudas en torno al trágico suceso que unos meses más tarde marcó para siempre a la población. ¿ qué buscaba Kelli en aquellos bosques solitarios? ¿ Y quién la estaba esperando?.

BREAKHEART HILL opens with: "...This is the darkest story that I ever heard..." Dr Ben Wade then relates the tale of Kelli Troy, a young teenager whose battered body was found thirty years before on Breakheart Hill near Choctaw in Alabama. Kelli was Ben’s first love and his unrequited passion for her forms the background. The other major back story is Kelli and Ben’s research into how Breakheart Hill originally got its name –part of the shameful past of Choctaw. Ben begins to go over the events around Kellie’s murder in his mind. The story chops backwards and forwards between characters and the sequence of events as a memory sets his thoughts off in different directions until slowly the whole story is revealed. There is a wide range of possible suspects. Although the reader is told that someone was tried and convicted for the crime, and all the evidence is slowly presented as to why he was convicted, the reader can't be sure he was the one.

Thomas H Cook is a master of writing dark, moody mysteries. The haunting atmosphere of a town where everyone has been affected by the violence of the murder that had taken place thirty years previously carries throughout the book until the very end. He masterfully starts to reveal something and then switches to something else completely different to throw you off the scent. Cook raises all sorts of ethical issues such as teenage love, racial integration, illegitimacy, making a stand despite public opinions, deception and finally hatred.

The only complaint I have is the ending – I have re-read it a few times and am still not sure I understood the significance of what I read. To go into this in-depth would be a major spoiler but suffice to say the ending was not satisfactory for me because of this. ( )

Town doctor Ben Wade narrates the sad history of Kelly Troy, a bright, intelligent girl who moves into a small Southern community, both shocking it with her outspoken views on segregation and charming it with her natural vivacity before she is tragically attacked on top of Breakheart Hill. Ben falls deeply in love with her, and author Thomas H. Cook is very good at depicting the black mood he falls into when his love is not returned. The narrative moves back and forth in time, skillfully manipulating our expectations. I thought I knew what had happened, became increasingly sure of it as the novel progressed, then had to revise my beliefs when I came to the final devastating pages. This is a excellent suspense novel. ( )