“The Winter Girl”

Matt Marinovich

Doubleday, $24.95

“The Winter Girl” is Matt Marinovich’s second novel. I suppose you could call it a mystery, though it has an odd quality that sets it apart from standard murder mysteries. Set in Shinnecock Hills in the off-season, “The Winter Girl” is cold, dark, bleak, and wintry. The book, like an impending winter storm, is filled with menace and the threat of destruction. 

It is narrated by Scott, who with the benefit of hindsight tells his story from some time in the future. Scott and his wife, Elise, live in Brooklyn but are staying at her father’s house in Shinnecock Hills so that she can visit him at Southampton Hospital. Her father, Victor, has metastatic colon cancer. Elise’s younger brother, Ryder, can’t help because he is in jail in Ohio, doing a five-year stretch for burglary and distribution of a controlled substance. When Ryder calls collect from prison, Elise takes the calls secretively in a room away from Scott’s hearing. 

Scott and Elise are an unhappy couple, both individually and together. “I’d wasted ten years of my life,” Scott tells us, “pretending to be a photographer.” 

“At night, Elise and I mostly watched television and avoided talking about how long it was taking her father to die. By early December, it was getting dark pretty early. By then, we had a routine down. I’d have dinner ready by the time I heard the wheels of our car on the short gravel driveway. . . . Once she gripped the steering wheel and pulled at it, as if she were going to tear it off. Then I saw her wiping the tears away . . . her mouth still gaping with grief. If you’re wondering why I didn’t run out there and comfort her, I don’t have an exact answer. One of the reasons is that it had been going on for almost a year.”

Because it is winter, and because it is the Hamptons, the houses around Victor’s home are empty. But the one right next door has lights on a timer. Scott, having too much time on his hands, finds this fascinating and spends a lot of time looking at the house through Victor’s binoculars. The lights in the seemingly empty house go on and off at set times every day. Every night at precisely 11 o’clock the lights in the bedroom click off. For some reason this unnerves Scott. 

“Besides my steadily growing affair with the house next door, there were other disturbing developments that week in December.” Victor begins calling from the hospital, leaving rageful messages on his home machine. “You son of a bitch,” he says. “Pick up. I know you’re there.” He leaves many angry messages. “How does she let you touch her? You’re a piece of shit.” He threatens to drown Scott in the bay with his own two hands. 

Elise, when she comes home from the hospital, blames it on the illness and the morphine. But Scott “always suspected that she had an uncomfortable secret regarding her father.” That night, she tells him some of it. We don’t get to know — at that point — just what Victor did to her, but, “It’s sick and it’s sad and a father who does that to his own child deserves a far worse death than being drowned in a bay.”

It is a tricky thing to review a book like “The Winter Girl” if you don’t wish to give away too much of the who-done-it-who-is-gonna-do-it. It would deeply spoil the read to reveal major plot points in a story such as this. I can comfortably say, however, that Mr. Marinovich believes, as Chekhov famously asserted, that if you don’t intend to use the gun at some point in your story, then don’t show it: “. . . deeper in his closet, an old shotgun zipped up in a beige bag. . . . I preferred my Nikon.” 

Suffice it to say that “The Winter Girl” has a dark and nebulously dangerous pall hanging over it. And the gun, as Chekhov would approve, gets used. 

There are several areas of tension. Scott and Elise’s marriage is clearly hanging on by the slenderest of threads. I vacillated between wondering if they intend to divorce or to murder each other. It turns out that Victor is quite rich, but it is questionable whether he will leave any of his fortune to his daughter. One cannot help but wonder would Scott or Elise want to kill the other for possession of this fortune? Do they want to kill Victor for the money? 

Another tension is the house next door. It is spooky in its deserted and seemingly abandoned condition. But it is a powerful lure for Scott, who is bored and lonely and becomes increasingly brazen about exploring it. Finally he finds an open door and trespasses.

Scott tells us, “The worst decisions never let you go. They come circling back, even on the best days, to find you.” That night, he and Elise get drunk, and he takes her over to explore the cold and empty house. He says, “I had this feeling that as long as we snuck around this house, we might stop finding ways out of the marriage. You need each other more when you have no idea what’s going to happen next.” They end up screwing in one of the cold bedrooms. 

Afterward, Scott starts to straighten up and pulls the comforter off the bed they have just finished on, only to reveal that the sheets beneath are stiff with dried blood. A lot of blood. Scott assumes someone has been murdered on the bed. Elise vomits when she sees the gore. They think about calling the police, but, out of what seemed to me a misguided fear of explaining their own trespasses to the police, decide not to. Instead, later, Scott goes over to the house with a bucket of soapy water to clean up any fingerprints and DNA traces they may have left. 

The house turns out to be occupied by an enigmatic and very strange young woman named Carmelita. Her relationship to the house, and as eventually turns out her connection to Victor, is unclear at first. Victor sends small amounts of cash to her, a few hundred here and there through Scott, and Scott does not know why. She knows a great deal about not only Victor, but also about Elise. Carmelita had some kind of sadomasochistic sexual thing going with Victor. Scott is “sickened by the precise blue and dull orange bite marks around her small breasts, as if some insane suckling child had tried to tear away her dark nipples.” 

Mr. Marinovich’s novel is a dark and gloomy and threatening read. When the ominous winter storm finally breaks, the story builds to a crescendo of murder and betrayal and brutal sadism. “The Winter Girl” is certainly no light summer read.

Michael Z. Jody, a regular book reviewer for The Star, is a psychoanalyst and couples counselor with a practice in New York City and Amagansett. 

Matt Marinovich has been an editor at Interview and People, among other magazines. He lives in Brooklyn.

Stony Brook Southampton’s Writers Speak series will resume on Wednesday at 7 p.m. with a conversation between April Gornik and Andrea Grover, curator of special projects at the Parrish Art Museum. The event will take place in the Radio Lounge of Chancellors Hall.

Among other things, they will talk about Ms. Gornik’s recently published book, “April Gornik: Drawings,” a complication of charcoal drawings done by the artist since 1984. The book includes introductory essays by Steve Martin and Archie Rand, an interview with the artist by Lawrence Wechsler, and an eight-page score for cello and piano, composed by Bruce Wolosoff and inspired by one of Ms. Gornik’s paintings.

The college is also offering a new, 17-session noncredit writing workshop for residents of eastern Long Island, beginning Wednesday at 5:20 p.m. and continuing through May 18. Students need not be accepted by, nor enrolled in, the Stony Brook Southampton M.F.A. program in creative writing in order to participate.

The workshop, which will be conducted by William Ste. Marie, an instructor at Stony Brook and the College of Staten Island, will focus on multiple genres. Students will read and analyze a variety of works to develop a foundation in the basics of writing, then concentrate on the short story, screenwriting, and poetry. Each student will produce a quality poem, a short story, and a short film script.

Class size is limited to 16 students; the cost is $700. Interested writers can apply at the Stony Brook Southampton website.

“The Brothers Vonnegut”

Ginger Strand

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27

In the prologue to his novel “Slapstick,” which he called “the closest I will ever come to writing autobiography,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “My longest experience with common decency surely has been with my older brother, my only brother, Bernard. . . . We were given very different sorts of minds at birth. Bernard could never be a writer. I could never be a scientist.” 

In “The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic,” Ginger Strand provides a vivid and fascinating portrait of those two different minds.

The book focuses primarily on a seven-year period from 1945 to 1952 when Bernard worked at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y., and Kurt was struggling to establish himself as a writer while working in the G.E. News Bureau, the company’s publicity department. Although Kurt’s name and work are now well known, at the time it was Bernard, an M.I.T. graduate with a Ph.D. in chemistry, who was making his mark as a researcher and inventor. 

During World War II, he worked as a research associate at the Chemical Warfare Service laboratory on methods for deicing aircraft. When he arrived at the G.E. Research Laboratory after the war, it was known as the House of Magic, and its catchphrase was “Are we having fun today?” The scientists were encouraged to follow their own curiosity and to conduct pure research as well as to pursue work with immediate and practical applications; the result was a seemingly endless line of new inventions. 

At G.E. Bernard was involved with two other scientists, the Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir and his assistant Vincent Schaefer, in what became known as Project Cirrus, experiments with cloud seeding and weather manipulation. While Langmuir and Schaefer first experimented with the use of dry ice in seeding to produce snow, it was Bernard’s discovery of the use of silver iodide that held the real key for more consequential results. The implications of their work were far ranging, not only scientifically but also commercially and militarily. The ability to control the weather held enormous benefits — precipitation for drought-stricken areas, the redirection of potentially cataclysmic hurricanes, or the transformation of desert landscapes into productive farmlands. 

That ability, however, could also possibly provide the military with a powerful weapon. In the post-Hiroshima world, the idea of weather manipulation, a weapon potentially even more powerful than the atomic bomb, held great interest as well as uneasiness. (G.E. ceded responsibility of Project Cirrus to the military, in part, to indemnify the company from any legal responsibility from unintended weather-related damage.) 

The work was also scientifically controversial. Meteorologists at the Weather Bureau looked skeptically at these interlopers — what did three chemists know about weather and weather patterns — and refused to acknowledge that cloud seeding worked without fully understanding the mechanism. They established their own Cloud Physics Project to check and challenge the claims of the G.E. scientists.

Kurt had a firsthand view of work at the House of Magic and the burgeoning and beneficial relationship between G.E. and the military as he worked in the company publicity department, a position he gained through Bernard’s suggestion. Throughout his time at G.E., however, his aim was to make his tenure there as short as possible. He was working diligently at learning to be a writer amid an increasing pile of rejection slips. He was encouraged and assisted by his wife, Jane, who gave him the courage to take the idea of writing seriously. Together they shared the dream of a life devoted to literature and art rather than science. 

He would find some early success placing his work with Collier’s, and when he was able to sell five stories and begin a novel, he gave G.E. his notice, moved his family to Cape Cod, and began to make his living as a writer.

Nevertheless, G.E. had given him something important as a writer. During his time in Schenectady, Kurt feared catching “G.E. disease” — becoming a company man and conforming to G.E.’s expectations. Observing up close the work there, he grew increasingly concerned about the dangers of a technocratic worldview and scientists who developed new technologies without regard to the unintentional damage they might cause. Blinded by a “techno-utopianism,” it was too easy for them to lose sight of the effects their discoveries might have on actual human lives.

Here was all the material Kurt needed for his stories: the dark side of science and the probable future spawned by it. G.E. was science fiction. In early stories like “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” and “Thanasphere” and novels such as “Player Piano” and “Cat’s Cradle,” he would portray the G.E. corporate culture and personality and the dangers of a technocratic worldview that resulted from it. (Interestingly, the idea for ice-nine, essential to “Cat’s Cradle,” originated with Irving Langmuir, who once suggested it to H.G. Wells as the basis for a story. Wells was not interested.)

“The Brothers Vonnegut” is a well-researched and seamless mash-up of science, literature, biography, literary analysis, social criticism, and cultural history. Ms. Strand provides a well-documented look at a meteorological controversy that touched two brothers as their lives and work intersected for a brief period at G.E. She does so with clarity and deceptive ease, moving between Bernard and Kurt, allowing each to illuminate and inform the other. 

One might naturally expect Kurt to take center stage in any work that features him, but Bernard and the story of weather modification emerge as the central focus of “The Brothers Vonnegut.” He personified the conflict between a love of science and a duty to humanity. His concerns with the ethical implications of the scientific work done at G.E. were the same as those Kurt would make the centerpiece of his literary work. He was the family “genius,” who eventually became uncomfortable with the idea of being the “kept scientist” of the corporation or the military. 

Bernard advocated for government regulation of weather manipulation, fearing the potential damage that could be caused if his discoveries were used recklessly. He recognized the moral imperative for scientists to pay attention to the damage that they and their research might do. He left G.E. for Arthur D. Little, a private research company in Cambridge, Mass., and began researching electrical charges and thunderstorms. 

Bernard would go on to become a professor of atmospheric sciences. He remained a man and a scientist of decency. And an important touchstone for a brother who happened also to be a writer.

William Roberson taught literature at Southampton College for 30 years. He now works at LIU Post.

Kurt Vonnegut lived in Sagaponack for many years. He died in 2007.

Grace Schulman, a Springs poet and a distinguished professor of English at Baruch College in New York City, has been chosen to receive the 2016 Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal for Distinguished Achievement in American Poetry. An awards ceremony is to be held in April at the National Arts Club in Manhattan. 

Ms. Schulman is the author of seven collections of poems including, most recently, “Without a Claim.” She is also the author of “Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems,” which was selected by Library Journal as one of the best poetry books of 2002 and was a finalist for the Phi Beta Kappa Award that year, and “The Paintings of Our Lives,” a selection of the Academy of American Poets book club. 

She is the editor of “The Poems of Marianne Moore,” and her recent collection of essays is “First Loves and Other Adventures.” 

Ms. Schulman, who has taught poetry at Princeton, Columbia, Wesleyan, and Warren Wilson College, is former poetry editor of The Nation and former director of the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, where she still conducts a poets’ tutorial.

Among her honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Italy. Her poems have received four Pushcart Prizes. 

Ms. Schulman, a resident of Clearwater, said this week that she is nearing completion of a new book of poems, and that she “writes best in the quiet woods and water of Springs.” 

Black Lit Read-In

Of course you don’t need an officially designated month to dig the great John Edgar Wideman’s tales of the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, to cite one example, but an officially designated read-in might encourage you to stand up and share them with friends, neighbors, countrymen. Such a one happens on Friday, Feb. 12, at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, put together with the help of the John Jermain Memorial Library. 

Readers have been invited to read fiction or nonfiction passages from black writers — poetry, too — starting at 5 p.m. Readers have also been asked to give someone at the venerable bookshop a heads-up call that they’ll be doing so.

Poetry at the Parrish

Maybe this is the year to goose dull February with a writing workshop, and not just any old workshop among a proliferation of workshops, but one in which you tread the airy, well-lit halls of Water Mill’s Parrish Art Museum in search of poetic inspiration.

Jennifer Senft, an editor who teaches English at Suffolk Community College, writes that she will “guide participants through the galleries, introduce a different poetic form each week, and lead the class in congenial feedback and discussion.” The Art of Poetry costs $140 for four sessions, $120 for museum members. It starts on Feb. 26 and continues for the four following Fridays from 10 a.m. to noon.

Just a touch more from Ms. Senft, if you will: “I’ll share published works at the start of each class, we’ll view and discuss a different exhibition each week, write, then workshop. We will read and review free verse as well as structured poetry.” Registration is online or by phone with the museum.

“Why We Write About Ourselves”

Edited by Meredith Maran

Plume, $16

“I only write what only I can write.” That is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s dictum regarding fiction, but surely it applies to the memoir as well.

In “Why We Write About Ourselves,” Meredith Maran has found 20 of the most compelling memoirists working today. Virtually all of them write fiction or poetry as well. Many of them distinguish between their fiction or poetry or personal essay writing and their memoirs. And yet the theme that resonates in these sections is the fact that many of these writers were taken aback, surprised, delighted, relieved at how important writing memoir became for them. 

Ms. Maran has used this format very successfully in a previous volume, “Why We Write,” which featured discussions with notables such as Meg Wolitzer, Walter Mosley, Gish Jen, Sebastian Junger, and Isabel Allende. In this volume, Ms. Maran has asked A.M. Homes, Dani Shapiro, Pat Conroy, Edwidge Danticat, Anne Lamott, Nick Flynn, James McBride, and 13 others about their thoughts, their pains, their disappointments, their successes in writing the memoir. 

For each entry Ms. Maran includes a snippet of the writer’s published memoir and writes an intro to orient the reader as to the writer’s strengths and accomplishments. Then she provides a thumbnail bio. And then — ta-da — she begins the interview. Questions regarding what’s important to the author. What works. What doesn’t. What the pitfalls are. There are a number of themes that run resoundingly through this volume. How to keep from hurting people. How to get at the truth. What is the truth? What is explosive? What is tedious? What truly matters?

This is a book designed to be dipped into. Because there is so much wisdom in these pages. So much is distilled. The very act of creating a memoir requires so much writing, sifting, considering, and more analysis.

Take, for example, A.M. Homes. Ms. Maran quotes an interviewer labeling Ms. Homes as “a social arsonist.” And then we get to the interview. Ms. Homes outright says: “I don’t like writing about myself.” She talks about the fact that rather than “Write about what you know,” she’d prefer to “Write about what you don’t know.” Her memoir sprang from a New Yorker essay she wrote about meeting her biological parents. She’d wanted to organize then stow away that information. But as she went on, she discovered that she needed to understand “primitive emotional experiences.” She struggled with protecting characters, with understanding how to tell the whole truth. 

Ms. Maran posed the question: “Whose story is it, anyway?” Ms. Homes realized that a memoir should do some good. “And not just for the memoirist.” She welcomed hearing from other people who had been adopted. In this text, Ms. Homes, the “social anarchist,” declares that “controversy is not a bad thing.”

In Dani Shapiro’s memoir “Devotion” she writes about her childhood, religion, and spirituality. She was raised by Orthodox Jews. In Ms. Maran’s introduction, she quotes Ms. Shapiro as saying that “Being yourself is hard, hard work.” Ms. Shapiro’s talk about what turned her to memoir-writing makes evident what was excruciating. After having written three novels, Ms. Shapiro realized that “I needed to stop fictionalizing the story that was haunting me: my parents’ car accident, my father’s death, my mother’s broken bones, the way my entire family changed in an instant. Telling the story in my novels, I hadn’t remotely accomplished what I’d hoped. The only way to do that was to write it as memoir.”

“I’m not a believer in memoir as catharsis. It’s a misapprehension that readers have that by writing memoir you’re purging yourself of your demons. Writing memoir has the opposite effect. It embeds your story deep inside you.”

And then she provides yet another deep truth about telling the truth: “Truth in memoir is a lie.” But not the kind of lie you think of as a lie about stealing from the cookie jar.

“Memory is utterly mutable, changeable, and constantly in motion. You can’t fact-check memory.”

In section after section, Ms. Maran gives us the deepest truths about the complicated importance and craft of memoir. Edmund White advises: “Cut to the chase. Don’t burden yourself with lots of exposition.” Somewhat surprisingly, Jesmyn Ward says that “Unlike with fiction, it’s easiest to write a memoir from an outline.” And then she says: “You get the most powerful material when you write toward whatever hurts.” Ayelet Waldman announces: “If you’re not uncomfortable and scared while you’re writing, then you’re not writing close enough to the bone.” 

And suddenly there are Cheryl Strayed’s thoughts: “The most powerful strand in memoir is not expressing your originality. It’s tapping into your universality.” She goes on to say: “Good writing is built on craft and heart. Another way of saying it is you must do your work and it must cost you everything to do it.” Yes. Heart. Yes. The core.

Perhaps the wryest lines in this compendium? Gloria Swanson’s: “I’ve given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can’t divorce a book.” Bravissima. Because the memoir requires thought and planning, and great luck and a great story and the deepest of honesty. And, above all, true love.

Laura Wells is a regular book reviewer for The Star. She lives in Sag Harbor.

A.M. Homes lives part time in East Hampton, and Dani Shapiro is a former Sag Harbor resident.

“Tales of Accidental  Genius”

Simon Van Booy

Harper Perennial, $14.99

Reading the novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Simon Van Booy’s own biography, one learns of the surprisingly disparate number of places where he has lived: rural Wales, Kentucky, Paris, Athens, and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And he hung out in the Hamptons for a while. Perhaps there were more addresses. But why mention all of these locales? The reason is endemic to Mr. Van Booy’s thinking and to the actions of his characters. 

This collection of short stories is head-spinningly international, embracing cultures and characters of extraordinary diversity: Chinese, German, Russian, Swiss, Texan, Los Angeleno, Southamptonite. While making us understand how specific place matters when focusing on the universal. 

In his writing Mr. Van Booy often comments upon the importance of talismans — he is careful to bring those talismans from the place where they originate to an unexpected location. 

Take, for example, his short story “The Muse.” A renowned Russian-born fashion designer, Alexandra, seemingly based in America, arrives in a European city. Tired from her flight, she is checking into the lobby of a swank hotel where she encounters a man in the lobby whose coat button is dangling by a thread. Rather than retire to her room, she asks him if she can sew on the button. 

The encounter is innocent. The reader learns that the sewing kit this designer pulls from her pocket in order to sew on the button was a specific bequest from her grandmother. The reader learns that Michael Snow is a screenwriter from Hollywood who was taught the art of screenplay writing by a mentor now long gone. This screenwriter goes to hotel lobbies to write the whole night long then sleeps all day. 

Alexandra asks why he doesn’t just write in his hotel room. The screenwriter says to the fashion designer: “Maybe in order to make people up, I need to see real ones.” We are left pondering whether what we are reading is true or fictional. In other words the most basic questions regarding art and life. 

In one of the story’s flashbacks, the reader sees the fashion designer figuring out how to create new fashion lines. “Each new collection began like this, in a city with no association. Alexandra would wander the streets, stroll through a bustling market, ride an empty bus — drink coffee in a dockside cafe as birds circled the open mouth of dawn.” 

In Berlin she follows this procedure and happens upon the shop of a watchmaker. She asks him about the watches and clocks he repaired that were never claimed. At first reluctant, he allows her to see the timepieces and then he talks and talks about them. She creates a new fashion collection she calls Zeit Verloren. “Time Lost.” “The Muse” is a story about time lost and time that is found. 

But back to the talisman: When Alexandra doesn’t expect it, Michael slips a Star of David from his mentor into her bag. All the time knowing that she might not discover the small symbol that was so important to him for a very long time. But he feels obliged to thank her for her kindness, for her attention to another, and, most of all, for her attention to his art, his writing. “Language merely points,[Alexandra] had read once in a book of German poetry; the rest must be imagined.”

Mr. Van Booy’s short story “Infidelity” is not so much about what happens between the sheets but what happens at the table. One particularly intriguing passage that also pulls the reader from one place to a very different one occurs when characters are at dinner in Los Angeles where a character, David, says:

“The goat cheese is good. . . . But I prefer the lobster bisque at Silver’s in Southampton.”

“Maybe my parents will take the kids there for lunch,” [his wife said].

“Oh my God, the desserts,” David said. “I could go there just for the desserts.”

How much is going on with those sweets. Here and there.

The centerpiece of Mr. Van Booy’s collection is “Golden Helper II,” an intriguing set of modern Aesop tales. Mr. Van Booy not only threw himself into Chinese-based stories with this work, but diligently studied Chinese. In one section he empathizes with a character saying:

“When our son acts badly, make a joke so he’s not embarrassed to admit he was wrong.”

“Although Little Weng is big now, put your arms around him once a day.”

“Make him eat until bursting.”

These “Golden Helper II” sections are earnest, heartbreaking, full of the tensions of modern life with the over-lading of the past.

Mr. Van Booy’s talent for metaphor shines throughout. In his story “The Goldfish” he writes: “For the first hour he drifted from room to room as if he were a fish himself, marveling at the different colors and shapes, and how some came right up to the glass.” Those fish are so evident. It was for good reason that Mr. Van Booy received a Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for his second book of short stories, “Love Begins in Winter.”

Now, a seeming departure for a review, but an oddly apt note: Mr. Van Booy dedicates this book to Barbara Wersba, a longtime East End writer. Mr. Van Booy’s gratitude to Ms. Wersba is not only touching, but also important given the importance of mentors in the lives of writers. Ms. Wersba was nominated for a National Book Award for “Tunes for a Small Harmonica.” Some of her other books include “Love Is the Crooked Thing,” “The Farewell Kid,” and “Walter: The Story of a Rat.”

Talk about locales: She was born in Chicago, lived in California, attended Bard, then returned to Greenwich Village, ending up on North Haven, having established a press on the East End because she cared so much about writers and writing and books. 

Mr. Van Booy was once interviewed as saying: “One of my literary heroes, Barbara Wersba, said that you never finish a book, only abandon it.” Yet one senses that he will never abandon his mentor, speaking about her at length in a recent Diane Rehm NPR interview. One of the most appealing qualities in any writer is loyalty to the craft, to the word, to the teacher.

“Tales of Accidental Genius” is at times wistful. As well as playful. Intuitive and always substantive. In “The Muse,” when the fashion designer Alexandra comments upon Michael Snow’s screenplay after their chance encounters, she crosses out “Untitled” on his title page and proposes another title: “The story of love is also the story of loneliness.” In Mr. Van Booy’s stories we are transported everywhere and there and back here. At this time and that time. And all around again. 

Laura Wells is a regular book reviewer for The Star. She lives in Sag Harbor. 

Simon Van Booy will read from “Tales of Accidental Genius” at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday at 5 p.m.

“The Murder House”

James Patterson and David Ellis

Little, Brown, $28

It’s not easy criticizing a writer who gives independent bookstores a million bucks just because he likes them, and who a year later, out of the largesse of his one-man bailout program, doubles down and offers to pay their employees’ Christmas bonuses.

Then again, who’s to say how much of “The Murder House” James Patterson actually wrote, collaborating as he does, and not for the first time, with David Ellis, an Illinois novelist and appellate court justice unafraid to invoke an “excited utterance” exception in a scene of courtroom evidentiary proceedings. (Inadmissible!)

Presumably Mr. Patterson is more than a mere sketcher of outlines or a reviewer of pages, signing off on one brief chapter after another. Mr. Ellis himself has said the man with top billing acts as a goad, urging drama and heat, not polysyllabic words and description, sex and ratcheted-up violence, not research.

So this, in other words, is a page-turner, the fastest read in the East. “The Murder House” is so plot-driven, in fact, the twists and guessing games so plentiful, its plot can scarcely be discussed without giving it all away. 

Be that as it may, there’s this house. It sits at the end of what’s called Ocean Drive in Bridgehampton and it’s rumored to be haunted. Not by the ghosts of great-grandchildren stiffed out of their pen company inheritance, not even by the specter of a Midwestern industrialist howling over the bulldozing of his historic Gilded Age stick style manse. No, the place has simply seen its share of slaughter — mostly women, often prostitutes, many in a ­basement torture chamber outfitted with chains, cages, and a metal spike for victims to be lowered upon, all at the hands of generations of a twisted family, beginning with the patriarch, Winston Dahlquist, a Dutch settler, we’re told, who built the house in the late 1700s and ran a lucrative potato farm.

And yet one surviving visitor from the recent past turns out to be our heroine, Jenna Murphy, a Southampton Town cop late of the N.Y.P.D. Smart, tough yet attractive, red-headed, Bronx background, a fondness for drink — have I read too many of these or is this Detective Darlene O’Hara, from another Patterson protégé, Peter de Jonge, all over again? 

Regardless, she’s at once companionable and relentless, if a little clueless in the boyfriend department. Can it be other than diminishing to have her notice the ringless finger of the “hunky owner” of Tasty’s Diner? But at least she kicks a slick-haired Wall Streeter with a “hocus pocus” investment job to the curb (after punching him in the mouth, no less).

The Hamptons are described as the realm of “socialites, the mega-wealthy, the trust fund babies and personal injury lawyers, the songwriters and tennis pros, the TV producers and stock speculators.” Fair enough. And by the by, the authors (Mr. Patterson’s a Floridian) get a lot right, from the references to Bridgehampton as a hamlet to the description of its school, “red brick and white pillars on Main Street — Montauk Highway, if you prefer.” 

More welcome, however, is the tour we get of the underside hereabouts as Murphy pursues her hunches: the self-consciously named Dive Bar, for instance, or the hell of the Riverhead jail, “a dank, dark, miserable cesspool, purgatory for the accused in Suffolk County, short on hope and long on desperation and bitterness.” A female visitor is “a rose sprouting in a swamp of manure.”

It must be said that the murders, in more than one passage, can be rough and graphic going. Consider: The perp carries in his “Fun Bag” a corkscrew, handcuffs, and a “handheld kitchen torch.” There’s death by hot poker through kidney, and up in Sing Sing, when a set-up (and, yes, hunky) local construction worker, dubbed “Surfer Jesus” by the glib media, finds himself crucified on a wooden worktable, the reader may start questioning the redeeming value.

At any rate, something smaller than a railroad spike was used, so let’s move on.

But, to where? Given the strictures of not blowing the whodunit, perhaps we can safely leave off with an image from near the book’s close, where, after decades of Bridgehampton history in which one great old structure after another was torn down, a tradition that dispiritingly continues, at last there’s a house that deserves it. 

Hold the hoarding, bring the purposeful mess. So says Durell Godfrey, thematically, artistically, literally, in her just-out “Color Me Cluttered: A Coloring Book to Transform Everyday Chaos Into Art” (Perigee, $15). Ms. Godfrey, an East Hampton illustrator and photographer once with Glamour magazine and now with The Star, will talk about her work and the book and sign copies of it tomorrow at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor. 

“To me, clutter is beautiful,” she writes in the introduction, “the stuff of our everyday lives. Adding a dash of color (or a rich palette — whatever you fancy) makes these illustrations feel like home,” and may be therapeutic for the congenitally stressed.

There follows page after charming page of drawings heavy on plants and Sunday-best hats, often featuring a lounging cat, and stuff, stuff, stuff: all manner of printed material, paintbrushes and colored pencils, socks and scarves. What’s more, an embedded seek-and-find game will have you searching out stray coffee cups, eyeglasses, lava lamps, and — why not? — a penguin or two. 

How do the hummingbirds survive the storms?

At our feeder again when all is blasted and down, 

oaks and hickories twisting even now. The birds

yet come to feed before the long trip they must take.

Here on our anniversary, their dancing bodies, hovering,

remind us of our own journey to who knows where.

Buffeted by bankruptcy, flayed by cancer, torn

by arguments reddening the breast, we still feed

on this sweet food seeping from the air between

our bodies, holding us captive to the other. We must

journey together, the rhythm of our impossible wings

lifting us into other tropics of our own devise.

From “Neuron Mirror” by Virginia Walker and Michael Walsh. Ms. Walker, who lives on Shelter Island and teaches English at Dowling and Suffolk Community College, will read from her work at the Unitarian Universalist meetinghouse in Bridgehampton tomorrow at 7 p.m. along with Rosalind Brenner and other poets.