Last Summer of the Camperdowns (Kelly)

Book Reviews
The plot unfolds like the Cape Cod season itself… beginning lazily, languidly, before heating up and morphing into a fast-paced thriller.
Abbe Wright - O Magazine


These vibrant personalities jump off the page individually, and the collective dynamic is as lifelike and scintillating as beautifully cast actors in an artfully directed play… the scenes and dialogue unravel organically, and razor-sharp witticisms tumble out effortlessly.
Redbook


Kelly’s raucous, deliciously creepy novel about the dysfunction of the über wealthy begins in 1972 as the hoity-toity Camperdown clan prepare for another summer.... The novel threatens to veer too predictably into Great Gatsby territory (long-buried secrets bubbling to the surface...but is saved by precocious Riddle’s dry-witted narration of events, at least until she witnesses a heinous murder and clams up.... [I]n a climax that’s a touch too hurried...no one, not even the creepy killer, escapes unscathed.
Publishers Weekly


The author of Apologize! Apologize! (2009) returns with another witty take on a dysfunctional family… Kelly is a very entertaining writer with a digressive style and a way with metaphor …readers will find much to like in this colorful story peopled with larger-than-life personalities.
Booklist


A 13-year-old girl finds that keeping secrets can have mortal consequences.... Kelly's new novel is just as scathingly witty as her best-selling debut [Apologize! Apologize!] but better plotted and even more emotionally harrowing, as narrator Riddle Camperdown looks back two decades to the disastrous summer of 1972.... Kelly skillfully builds almost unbearable tension, slipping in plenty of dark laughs en route to a wrenching climax that leaves in its wake some painfully unresolved questions—just like life. More fine work from a writer with a rare gift for blending wit and rue.
Kirkus Reviews