Book of Knives: A Novel

(Paperback)

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When Nora agrees to help her new husband, Paul, and his family fix up Hidden Lake Camp, she didn't expect it to be in such a state of ruin. The dock full of rotten boards, smashed windows, cabins falling apartit's all a past he'd just as soon bury. Only a few months, he said. They'd drive north to get Paul's elderly parents settled while he and his brother make enough repairs to sell the property.

The summer camp, however, and its deep lake have other plans.

On the first night, Nora stumbles through a first meal with his difficult family. Her sister-in-law shows off a prized collection of handmade knives, thirteen in all.Long summer days stretch before them and one by one the knives begin to disappear.

By the time the fourth and fifth vanish from behind locked doors and out from under watchful eyes, Nora can barely sleep. There's talk of ghosts, secret rooms and someone at the summer camp found dead in the tall grass.

Unsettling, gripping, and totally original, Book of Knives is a literary thriller that shows how one person's unraveling can bring the whole house down.

'Beautifully written and endlessly absorbing, this is a novel to read with the covers up around your chin and a candle burning.' Sarah Taylor Stewart, author of the Maggie D'arcy mysteries

'Seen through the perceptive eyes of complex characters, a series of vivid scenes unfolds.One finds all one's worst fears echoed here in an increasingly suspenseful and surprising crescendo of events.' Sheila Kohler, author of the literary thrillerOpen Secrets, one ofVogue's best books of 2020

Reviews

Book of Knives is a beautifully written, richly compelling, Jamesian novel of creeping claustrophobia and menace. Haines spins a web so intricate, and so well constructed, that you're unaware of its strands until you are completely enmeshed in it. -- Craig Russell, author of Hyde and The Devil Aspect

In Book of Knives, Lise Haines has created a believable world of terror where nothing is what it seems. Seen through the perceptive eyes of complex characters, a series of vivid scenes unfolds. One finds all one's worst fears echoed here in an increasingly suspenseful and surprising crescendo of events. Wonderfully done. -- Sheila Kohler, author of the literary thriller Open Secrets, one of Vogue's best books of 2020

In Lise Haines's subtly menacing and spooky mystery, Nora, a young widow, and her new husband, Paul, join his family at their decaying lakeside summer camp. As a collection of knives disappear from the camp one by one, other unsettling things start to happen and Nora begins to suspect a ghostly presence is haunting the lake and cabins. Beautifully written and endlessly absorbing, this is a novel to read with the covers up around your chin and a candle burning. -- Sarah Taylor Stewart, author of the Maggie D'arcy mysteries

Lise Haines, in Book of Knives, as in all her work, is an astute psychologist, a cool, unsentimental investigator of humans, who often locates the hard truths. In a time of circumspection, her bracing recognition of a more complex human consciousness hits the spot. I admire her work and her sensibility. -- Rick Moody, author of Ice Storm and Hotels of North America

Lise Haines' Book of Knives is an utterly absorbing, extremely suspenseful, and elegantly written literary ghost story. I was intrigued, and scared, and ultimately deeply moved by this compelling novel about family and the love that transcends death. -- Jessica Treadway, author of Infinite Dimensions

Author Bio

A past finalist for the PEN Nelson Algren Fiction Award, LISE HAINES is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College and a former Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University. On a free afternoon, you will find her writing, curled up with a novel, lost in a museum, at the movies, out in nature or exploring the city. Her favorite travels have taken her to Kyoto, Paris and Venice. She is the author of several novels.