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Summary
Summary
In this long-awaited sequel to The Hunt Club, set in the swampy South Carolina Lowcountry, New York Times bestselling author Bret Lott returns with a literary page-turner about murder and family secrets. Though Dead Low Tide continues the story of Huger Dillard, this haunting work of fiction brilliantly stands on its own. No longer a teenager and now a young man, Huger must come to terms with and confront the truth about his community, his past, and the mysterious place he calls home.
While most of the residents in the wealthy, historic Charleston enclave of Landgrave Hall are asleep at two-thirty in the morning, Huger Dillard and his father, "Unc," are heading, via jonboat, to the adjoining golf course. Blinded by a terrible accident that killed his wife, Unc prefers to practice his golf game when no one is watching. But before anyone can even tee off, Huger makes a grisly find: a woman's body, anchored deep in the mud at the water's low tide.
The discovery sets off a chain of events that puts Huger and his family up against secret military forces, old friends, longtime neighbors, lost loves, and shadowy global networks. The only thing connecting them all is Landgrave Hall--and the treacherous reason why this area is so important to so many people.
Author Notes
Bret Lott is the author of the novels Ancient Highway, A Song I Knew by Heart, Jewel (an Oprah's Book Club selection), The Hunt Club, Reed's Beach, A Stranger's House , and The Man Who Owned Vermont; and the story collections A Dream of Old Leaves, How to Get Home , and The Difference Between Women and Men; the memoir Fathers, Sons, and Brothers; and the writing guide Before We Get Started . Formerly editor of The Southern Review, he was appointed to the National Council on the Arts in 2006. Bret Lott lives with his wife, Melanie, in Hanahan, South Carolina.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A murder, a scandal, and a dangerous web of secrets make up Lott's 13th novel, the sequel to 1998's The Hunt Club. Huger Dillard, ever opinionated and vocal, narrates the story, punctuating the text with his commentary as he unravels the mystery of Landgrave Hall, a small wealthy community in South Carolina where something important seems to be brewing. Huger (short for Huguenot), at 27, lives in the family home, tending to his blind father, "Unc." When the two of them sneak onto a golf course late at night so that Unc can practice his swing in private, they uncover a body in the mire of low tide, tipping off a series of events that brings armed forces, terrorist activity, and skeletons from the closet careening into motion. Through these events, Huger, initially complacent and seeming to have given up on life, starts to believe that things could be better. "Maybe I wanted to have my own life, to live on my own and not have to ferry Unc through his days, me his chauffeur and caddy and coffee bearer and eyes every day I was alive." The initial discovery and premise of the novel is captivating, but the tale loses steam midway and falters into monotony. The final chapters arrive with a rush of events and information that assemble into a jarring and thrilling outcome, but more clues and tension leading up would guarantee that a reader might actually arrive at the end. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The lush and lovely South Carolina community of Landgrave Hall is steeped in military history and populated by citizens with money to spare. But when Huger Dillard and his blind father, Unc, arrive at the area golf course in their rowboat, they don't care a whit about the nearby Naval Weapons Station or the residents with their fancy cars and manicured lawns. Unc is there to practice his swing, far from the comments and commentary of his neighbors. But his backswing is put on the back burner when the pair finds a woman's body anchored deep in the mud at water's edge. Who is she and what is she doing there? Soon Huger and Unc are at the center of an investigation that attracts the attention of the navy, Homeland Security, and plenty of nosy neighbors. As facts about the dead body surface, so do harrowing truths about Landgrave Hall. This latest offering from the former Pushcart Prize winner and Oprah author is a bit less engaging than his previous novel, Ancient Highway (2008), but it will still appeal to readers who enjoy elegant prose.--Block, Allison Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
As if a history of murder in his teenage past weren't sufficient fodder for this thriller's protagonist, the narrator of Lott's latest novel, a young Southerner named Huger Dillard, also claims a luxe address near the seventh hole of the Landgrave Hall Golf and Country Club that's walking distance from the only prison for terrorists in the country; a black ex-girlfriend who happens to be both deaf and mute; and a blind father he calls Unc. ("It's complicated," Huger explains with a Facebook-ian disdain for complexity.) All that's missing, at least until Chapter 2, is a dead body. Which the narrator and his father inconveniently discover in a local creek en route to a golf game in the wee hours of the morning. Lott uses this brief nod to genre convention as a launching pad for a critique of class distinctions and outmoded laws. Aside from being ticked off at "the dimbulb antics of the Rich and Stupid" who hold his arriviste parents at arm's length, Huger parses his observations in the highfalutin locutions of a guy with latent literary aspirations ("the wet of them" in reference to his mother's eyes, "the all of it" of the sky). The word "shard" gets a workout, a subliminal comment, perhaps, on the syntactic mannerisms that give this mystery its particular nourish kick.
Kirkus Review
The Hunt Club (1998, etc.), Huger Dillard, now a grown man but not exactly mature, confronts another murder 10 years later. Huger, 27, has never quite begun his life since the trauma of killing a man at 17. He dropped out of college and has no real career. He now lives with his newly rich mother and father "Unc" in the exclusive golfing community Landgrave outside Charleston and pines for his lost love, African-American Tabitha, now getting her post-doc at Stanford. Approaching the golf course by boat late one night--Unc likes to practice when no one is around--Unc and Huger find a woman's body floating in the marsh. Not only do the police show up, but also some intimidating naval officers from the U.S. Naval Weapons Station across the water. They were watching Unc and Huger in their boat through night goggles like the ones Unc won playing poker against base Commander Prendergast during a weekly game hosted by the father of Tabitha's current beau. After finding the body, Huger comes home to find Prendergast alone with his mother and creepily solicitous. Meanwhile there's another body found the same night, a man in the trunk of his car. Are the two deaths connected? Huger wants to figure out what is going on, but mostly he wants to get Unc to his weekly poker game where Unc intends to get those military-property goggles back to Prendergast--or does he? Up until a point, the novel leans toward the slightly hangdog humor of Huger's slacker life, but suddenly in a rush of plot background and forced dialogue comes a terrorism-centered plot full of traitors and stereotypically nasty Muslims in sleeper cells. Huger is an appealing narrator, but his story of finding himself is only moderately interesting, and the tacked-on thriller is cartoonish.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This sequel to 1998's The Hunt Club picks up the story of Huger Dillard and his blind father, Unc, in the present. When Unc and Huger discover a dead body during a midnight boating and golfing foray at the local country club, they wonder why U.S. Navy security and the Department of Homeland Security get involved in the case. Father and son soon find their answers as they become unwilling victims in a terrorist plot gone awry, in which terrorist and law enforcement often seem one and the same, and family secrets and Southern mores are intricately woven. VERDICT This literary thriller of the first order grippingly deals with current events while revealing the secrets, ambitions, loves, and fears of a family that readers grow to cherish. Fans of The Hunt Club will want to catch up with Unc and Huger. [See Prepub Alert, 7/18/11.]-Thomas L. Kilpatrick, formerly with Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 "Hold on," Unc whispered, warning me. I turned, saw him standing there at the stern and polingthe jon boat in. He was only a silhouette in this dark, thin stars around himfor the half-moon we had out here. "You hold on, old man," I whispered, andturned, looked ahead. None of this was my idea. He knew we were almost there for how shallow he had toset that pole and give it the push. But it was me here in the bow about to tossthe cinder-block anchor far as I could into the marsh,hoping I'd make it onto the dry ground past it. It was me could reach out andtouch pluff mud and cordgrass on either side of us, the two of us at the headof this finger creek at dead low tide. Like always, it was me looking out for the two of us,because Unc is blind. Two-thirty in the morning, and we were where we shouldn'tbe. Though a higher tide would have helped us get in a little farther, this waswhen Unc wanted to be here, for no other reason than two o'clock was too early,three too late. The cordgrass and spartina and salt-marsh hay stoodsilver in the moonlight, all of it crowding up on us the closer we got in, thethick rim of black pluff mud a couple feet wide beneath it. To the left andabove and past the marsh I could see a house a good twenty yards in, anotherone to the right, back through trees and maybe fifty yards away. All I couldsee of that one was an outside light, a coach lamp looked like, and the dime-sizedhalo it cast on the brick wall it was mounted to. What worried me was the house to the left, the closerone. Like all the houses out here-they call them cottages, only thirty-three ofthem on this whole parcel of land-it was big, this one white stucco and twostories, two chimneys, a circular gravel drive out front. But I only knew that from when I'd seen the place indaylight. At two-thirty in the morning, and creeping in through the marsh atthe back of the place, all I could make out was the white of that stucco, andthe waist-high brick fence that ran alongside the whole thing almost down to thiscreek. And the light in an upstairs window somebody'd cut on acouple minutes ago. A light still on, right now. "Let's go back," I whispered. "Thatlight's still on." We were almost there now, me already up on my knees andleaning a little farther out over the bow. I had the cinder block in bothhands, the ratty nylon rope it was tied to trailing back to where I'd cleatedit off, because I knew we wouldn't be turning back. I'd been out with Unc onthese efforts enough times to know once we were this close there was no goingback, and now here of a sudden and yet no surprise at all was the cold stink ofthe pluff mud thick around me. "That light probably means ol' Dupont's nurse is upto change his diaper," Unc whispered. "He's got to be a hundred ifhe's a day." "And what if his nurse takes a look out the window,sees-" "Oh," Unc let out then, the word more a solidchunk of sound than a word at all, nowhere on it a whisper, and at the sametime I felt a hard shiver through the boat. For a second I thought we'd hit bottom, the creek shoaledin here at the head. But I knew this spot. I'd been here before, knew thebottom didn't come up until the very end. I quick turned back at Unc, saw hewas looking down and to the left, the bill of the Braves ball cap he alwayswore part of that silhouette now, him in profile to me. He'd touched something down there, had the pole up out ofthe water, held it with both hands like he was ready to gig a frog. And then Icould feel that the jolt hadn't meant the bottom at all, and that we were stillfloating free, still inching closer to that pluff mud and where I'd have toheave the block to anchor us in. Something'd scared him, made him flinch hard enough toshake the whole boat. That's what it was, and even though he couldn't see athing he was still turned to it, ready. "What?" I whispered. "Don't know," he said, too fast. He lowered thetip of the pole to the water, eased it down slowly, like he was testing forsomething. "Thought it was a gator," he whispered. "But I don'tthink it was." He let it down all the way, until the top of the pole waseven with his chest, let it set there a second. "Something," he whispered. He turned to me, said again, "Hold on." And then we hit ground for certain, and here I was,shoved forward out over the bow for the pitiful bit of momentum we had goingin. I let go the cinder block, tried hard to get both hands on the gunwales oron the bow itself or just somewhere, anywhere, to keep me from tipping over andinto that mud. But it was too late, and I heard the huge aluminum donk!of the block hit the hull in the same instant I fell forward and into pluff mudto my elbows. We were both silent for how loud that sound was, and theway it caromed like a billiard ball one end of the world to the other out hereon the water. I already had words lined up in me, pissed-off ones it waseverything I had to hold back for the cold of this mud, and the stink of it,and the stupidity of falling in like this when I'd been out on jon boats mywhole life. I had words for Unc, and this mission, and how none of this was myidea. I had words. But all I could do was swallow them down. And watch that window up there, past the marsh grass. Somebodyhad to have heard us. Somebody had to. Nothing happened. Nothing: no face at the window of thatGuatemalan nurse Judge Dupont had taking care of him, or no old Dupont himself,holding close a shotgun. No turning off of the light, or turning on an outsideone so's to scare off whatever dangerous intruders these were out here.Nothing. And so I leaned back as best I could, pulled my arms outof the mud, and whispered "Shit!" through teeth clenched tight forholding off every other word I had. I held my hands out in front of me a second, looked atthe pure black of them in this dark, whatever moonlight there was soaked rightup in that black so that it seemed I had stubs for arms. "Shit," Iwhispered again, though this time there was nothing for it. Just me, pissedoff. "Nope," Unc whispered from behind me."Pluff mud's only detritus. Organic material breaking down. Maybe you'dknow this if you hadn't quit college." "Not funny," I whispered. I turned toward him,made to move farther back in the boat to where I could lean over one side orthe other, wash my hands off in the water, the bow set tight in that mud."And one more time: I quit for good reason." "I'm sure you did," he whispered. I looked up at him, ready to spit words at him. Ready forit. But he was looking off to his left again, and a littlebehind him now. Back, I could tell, to where whatever he'd touched had been. Asthough he could see anything at all. "If it's a gator, he's long gone," hewhispered, "but you might ought to wait a sec before you put your armsdown in that water." He turned, looked down at me: that silhouette again,behind him those thin stars. "Thought I told you to hold on," he whispered. My name is Huger Dillard. You say it YOU-gee, not likeit's spelled. When I was a kid and people would ask about it, I'd tell them Iheard it was French. That's all. But then I went off to college, started after what myfriends used to call an edumacation. By friends I mean the ones I used to have,before my mom and I moved out of the old neighborhood and into the new one.It's a different set I run with now, if you'd even call them a set, or if you'dcall what I have to do with them running. I'm twenty-seven now, and stillliving at home though, like every one of us still hanging out with Mom and Popat the ranch, I've got my reasons. And Unc isn't my uncle. He's my father. It's complicated. But to my edumacation: Huger, I learned in a coursecalled History of the South, taught by a tweedy and mildewed old professor whonever once lifted his eyes from his notes to look at the class, is short forHuguenot, a fierce people who came here to Charleston from France once they'dhad enough of being burned at the stake and forced to be galley slaves andwhatnot because they wouldn't lick the silk slippers of Louis XIV, Mr. Sun Kinghimself. Back in the day, the word Huguenot meant a kind of curse on who youwere and what you believed. But then it became a good thing, and meant you werea durable son of a bitch who wouldn't put up with anything. Huger. It was a good name before I went off and had my goat getting schooled, and it still is. But it's come to me in the six years since I've been backthat it's a name I don't think I deserve anymore. Because it was this kid namedHuger who chose to quit said college after two and a half years, though theword quit is a lie: my grades kicked my ass all the way from Chapel Hill tohere. Some kid named Huger quit because he was lost up there.He wasn't as smart as he'd led himself to believe, even with an SAT of 1510. And I don't think I can live up to being an endurable sonof a bitch anymore because, if you were to ask me point-blank, I'd have to tellyou I actually like being twenty-seven and living at home. I like watchingafter Unc, taking him to whatever appointments he might have with his financialadviser, or to the bank, or out to what's left of Hungry Neck Hunt Club onthose Friday nights when we have a hunt on a Saturday. I don't even mindhauling him out to his Thursday night poker parties at that huge orange monstrosityof a house in Mount Pleasant, though I won't set foot in the manse for the bitof history I have between the host's son and myself. It's a big event for Unc, even though it happens everyThursday night ten to two, Thanksgiving included. A weekly opportunity for Uncand thirty or forty of his closest chums to win and/or lose up to five grand anight, if they so desire. It's also an evening in which, because I don't wantto leave Unc alone in case he taps out early but generally because I don't wantto be at home alone with Mom, I end up sitting in the Range Rover out on thestreet with the other thirty or forty cars and playing solitaire on my iPhone,or feeding locations into the Maps app to see how I'd get from here to Fargo orLos Alamos or Palo Alto. Or I'll end up just sitting there and thinking abouthow empty the all of this life is, and how much I am queasily enjoying it. Oh. And I'll ponder, some of the time, on a girl involvedwith this whole maudlin malaise thing I have working. Her name's Tabitha. She'son a postdoc at Stanford. I don't think I deserve this Huger moniker, finally,because ever since I gave up, it's seemed a good life to do nothing other thanfart my way through a day. Or a night. Case in point: this excursion. Because the truth of the whole thing, the absolute andpathetic and sorry stupid reason we were out here at the head of a finger creekbacked up to a cottage in the first place, the reason for all this intrigue andmystery and worries over an old man at a window toting a shotgun or aGuatemalan nurse hot on the phone to Hanahan's finest for the dumb metal donk!of a cinder block dropped-the truth of the whole dense and gratuitous andembarrassing thing is that we were here because Unc wanted to golf. Golf. And as I leaned over the gunwale, made to put these pluffmud stubs into the water to wash them off, I couldn't help but think on my name-HugerDillard-and how, for the life of me, I ought not to care how the hell anybody'dpronounce it. Here was yet another moment in the crowded long line of them-aline more crowded and longer every day-when the me I am sneaks up on me, tapsme on the shoulder, then sucker punches me when I turn around, and I realize Iam, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, smack in the middle of wasting mylife, living the way I do. This was what I had come to: sneaking Unc out to golf attwo-thirty in the morning because he was too damned proud to be caught doing soin daylight. None of this was my idea. But here I was. I looked down at that water, and in the last instantbefore I put my hands in to start at washing off this detritus, this organicmaterial breaking down-this shit that might as well have been me-I caught Unc'sreflection in the water. He stood behind me and to my left, his silhouette showingup clear and sharp for this still water at dead low tide. I could see that poleoff to the side and in the water, and the bill on his ball cap, him turned fromme again and looking back. I could even make out the thin wash of stars behindhim. All of this in the water, and in an instant. I heard him take in a small breath, then whisper low,"Now what in the hell was that?" the words no louder than a breathback out, meant for nobody but himself. I put my hands into the water, troubled it big for howhard it was to get off this mud. Excerpted from Dead Low Tide: A Novel by Bret Lott All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
