Book Review: Tigers in Red Weather by Liza Klaussmann.

Product details:
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company.
Release date: July 17th 2012.
ebook, 336 pages.
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Ages: Adult.
Source: Netgalley.

Nick and her cousin, Helena, have grown up sharing sultry summer heat, sunbleached boat docks, and midnight gin parties on Martha's Vineyard in a glorious old family estate known as Tiger House. In the days following the end of the Second World War, the world seems to offer itself up, and the two women are on the cusp of their 'real lives': Helena is off to Hollywood and a new marriage, while Nick is heading for a reunion with her own young husband, Hughes, about to return from the war.

Soon the gilt begins to crack. Helena's husband is not the man he seemed to be, and Hughes has returned from the war distant, his inner light curtained over. On the brink of the 1960s, back at Tiger House, Nick and Helena--with their children, Daisy and Ed--try to recapture that sense of possibility. But when Daisy and Ed discover the victim of a brutal murder, the intrusion of violence causes everything to unravel. The members of the family spin out of their prescribed orbits, secrets come to light, and nothing about their lives will ever be the same.

Brilliantly told from five points of view, with a magical elegance and suspenseful dark longing, Tigers in Red Weather is an unforgettable debut novel from a writer of extraordinary insight and accomplishment.

An accomplished debut of masterful storytelling and sumptuous prose, Liza Klaussmann’s Tigers in Red Weather is a gripping quarter-century saga detailing the lives, loves, betrayals and obsessions of one family as they spend long hot summer days at their family estate of Tiger House on Martha’s Vineyard.

The tone of Tigers in Red Weather, when it opens, is deceptively carefree and enthusiastic with nothing to hint at the darkness that will enter the lives of cousins Nick and Helena as the years pass by. But how could they have known what lay ahead of them? When we first meet Nick and Helena in the days following the end of the Second World War, they have the world at their feet, and are about to embark on new lives, which they hope will be abundant with love, excitement and opportunity.  Free-spirited Nick is to be reunited with her dashing husband, Hughes, who has been away at war, while timid Helena finds herself a newlywed in glare of the bright lights of Hollywood. On paper, Nick and Helena lead charmed lives, but the reality is very different indeed.  Nick soon finds out that post-war Hughes is a very different character to the man she married.  Nick craves spontaneity and excitement in her marriage, while Hughes wants nothing more than a wife who is happy to stay at home and have a baby.  Nick could think of nothing better to bore her to tears. And Helena, while content to dote on her baby, finds herself increasingly unhappy in her marriage to a man she doesn’t even know.

Already the veneer of Nick and Helena’s perfect lives is starting to splinter, and when, in 1959 we meet the cousins again, the events that will shatter them forever are set in motion.   Nick’s daughter Daisy takes over the narration here and so we witness these events first hand when, along with her cousin Ed, she stumbles upon a dead body, brutally murdered. When Nick calls her husband to Tiger House to deal with the fallout of these disturbing events, Hughes immediately senses that something is not quite right, and while the murder is seemingly unconnected to his family, he digs deeper only to find that there is something very dark and disturbed lurking within the walls of Tiger House.

The  question is whether Hughes can find out what it is and if he can stop it before it’s too late?

Compelling, captivating, and completely engrossing, Tigers in Red Weather is a perfectly woven tale of broken families and fractured friendships, secret obsessions and the importance of a promise made, never to be broken.  Though this is a great beach read, Tigers in Red Weather also contains a devilishly dark edge that will keep you reading late into the night.