Review: Big Happenings in a Small Town
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 15, 2014
A decrepit old house, The House of Three Murders, sits ominously in a thicket in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The site of a gruesome mutilation years before, the house sits almost forgotten until the lives of five people intersect with it on a November night in 1960.Gary J. George’s The House of Three Murders takes the reader on a wild journey through the lives of these five, mainly from the point of view of Charlie Merriman, a young Mojave Indian, and Aeden Snow, a high school student. George uses an interesting technique to tell his tale – Merriman’s story is told in third person, while we hear directly from Snow. Instead of being disruptive, as such point of view switches often are, this method of telling the story helps to heighten the tension as George adeptly weaves the threads of two disparate lives together to bring the story to a satisfactory conclusion.The author does a remarkably effective job of painting small-town life, and his dialogue is spot on in pulling us into the narrative. The House of Three Murders is a tale well-told.