I grabbed this after reading her newest book and she did not disappoint. I did not see what was coming. I love the way she handles relationships between people---she really gets you right IN there. ( )

Summers on Cape Cod are a family tradition for Jed and his sister Callie, but when Callie seems desperate for extra support after the birth of her second child, Jed takes leave from his job in the city to come out to the summer house. Being at the cape brings fond memories of summers at the beach, playing tennis and hosting parties by the pool, but Jed is also reminded of the tragedies his family endured, which put an end to their carefree way of life. When rummaging through a closet one day, he finds a small box containing an old bathing suit and is stunned. He remembers vividly who wore it.

Marcella lives alone in the cape town of Mashantum, busy with her garden, her cooking and her independence. She thinks only occasionally of her ex-husband Anthony, and desires that her teenage daughter Toni would visit more frequently, but is otherwise content. She avoids thinking of the painful secrets of the past until one day she answers a knock at the door to find Jed.

The Swimming Pool was a page-turner -- captivating and compelling. I was rooting for Marcella and Jed, despite the seemingly doomed and futile nature of their relationship. I'd recommend it as a beach read, partly because of the setting, if you don't mind a bit of tragedy and sadness coupled with your romance. ( )

A novel told from multiple voices, unraveling the mysteries surrounding the death of Cecil and Betsy McClatchey. Betsy was murdered one night when she came home alone and found a robber in the house, waiting for her. Suspicion immediately fell to her husband, Cecil, who had been out of town on a business trip - but the maid at the hotel where he was staying reported that when she cleaned up his room in the morning, nobody had slept in the bed.

Cecil has an alibi, but he won't even tell the police what it is: he was with Marcella, a married woman with whom he was having an affair. He knows he's innocent and he thinks he can keep silent and wait for the cops to pin down the real murderer. But little progress has been made, and then Cecil dies in a car crash. It looks like suicide, since he drove head-on into a tree, but it may also have been a heart-attack. Many people think that the car crash is proof of Cecil's guilt.

The novel takes place years after Betsy and Cecil have died, when their two children - Callie and Jed - decide to visit their summer house on Cape Cod. Left to the family by a northern uncle, it's about a mile away from the beach, built around a swimming pool. Callie and Jed are adults now, no longer teenagers, but they are still suffering from the deaths of their parents and recent events make both siblings unravel

Callie is suffering from severe post-partum depression. She's just had a new baby and feels little attachment to it, and her marriage is on the rocks. She decides to spend the summer up on the Cape, hoping that she will feel some connection to her dead mother there. Jed has made his way throuhg college and law school and is working as a lawyer at a firm in Atlanta, but he feels detached from his own life. He decides that he wants to go up to the Cape and spend the summer helping his sister with her new baby.

Once on the Cape, Callie's depression deepens while Jed finds an old swimsuit in storage at the house and recognizes it as Marcella's. Jed doesn't know that his father Cecil had an affair with Marcella, but he was half in love with her himself. He decides to seek her out.

Marcella is living alone a few hours away. She's divorced from her husband, taking care of her daughter, planting a beautiful garden, taking long walks on the beach, and cooking. She's a native Italian and works as a translator. When Jed shows up, Marcella is attracted to him but realizes that the thing Jed wants most in the world is to find out who killed his mother, and why his father died. Marcella confesses that she was having an affair with Cecil, and that they were together on the night of his mother's murder. Despite this confession, Jed decides to act on his continuing attraction to Marcella and the two begin an affair.

What Marcella doesn't tell Jed is that she knows who did kill Betsy: her husband, jealous about the affair, hired a hit man to kill Cecil. But something went wrong, and the hit man killed Betsy instead. Jed is thinking about telling his sister Callie that he has proof that their father is innocent, but he doesn't: he can tell that she's already in a dark place and he knows that Callie never suspected their father, while Jed did. It's the state of knowing-but-not-telling that forms the center, and fulcrum, for the novel. LeCraw is writing about secrets, very dark and painful ones, but ultimately concludes that in most cases, keeping those secrets is for the best.

As the summer ends, Callie's post-partum depression spikes and she barely resists a strong impulse to kill her baby. But, having overcome the ultimate demon, she's able to hold herself together better in the future. Jed's affair with Marcella ends abruptly, for no obvious reason since both are still strongly attached to one another; Marcella just calls it off. Jed goes home, resumes his life, finally finds a new girl he can marry. Marcella's ex-husband Anthony starts coming around again; Marcella confronts him about the assassination that he ordered and he says he doesn't understand, since the hit man was ordered to kill Cecil with a gun, not Betsy with a knife. Still, his guilt is probable. But Marcella lets him spend time at her home and finally he asks her to marry him again, and Marcella accepts.

SWIMMING POOL is a quiet, domestic novel with a bite. It's well-written, pitched to readers who like a difficult moral (in this case: sometimes it's better not to tell a secret) and sophisticated writing. However, it's very slow, and the big revelations about who killed whom and why are obvious very early on. On the whole, I wasn't impressed. ( )

I got this book as an Early Reviewer selection and for some reason felt the necessity to read the entire book despite the fact that I wasn't impressed with it. I guess I hung in there to see if it would ever redeem itself. Unfortunately, it did not. Improbable plot, unlikely sexual encounters, horribly stilted dialog, unlikeable characters, paper-thin plot--this book had it all. Total waste of time. ( )

This novel takes us into the lives of the family members that were victimized by an unsolved mystery that took place years ago. When Betsy was found murdered in her Atlanta kitchen she leaves her children, Jed and Callie, and her husband Cecil, to deal with the aftermath of the event.

The book opens in a summer home that the McClatchey family has always owned on Cape Cod. Even though both of their parents are gone, Jed and Callie decided to keep the home in the family. Callie has married and has two children of her own while Jed can never seem to be a part of a committed relationship. It is clear that Jed and Callie are both a couple of broken, disheartened souls and they have decided to spend the summer, along with Callie's husband and children in the Cape Cod home.

Jed finds himself drawn to Marcella, a woman that he vividly remembers from his youthful days when his parents were alive and the neighborhood in the Cape was bustling with fun and energy. When he confronts Marcella it is quite a surprise to find that they are both full of passion for one another. This summer affair will lead to secrets revealed, some secrets kept, and finally a tragedy that is unavoidable.

I have to admit that I didn't really enjoy this book, but it still kept me turning the pages. It held a very depressing element to the storyline and the affair between Marcella and Jed seemed quite unrealistic to me. I can understand why Jed would find himself attracted to the older woman that Marcella was, but would he really stay attracted to her once he found out that his own father had an affair with her years before? And as far as Marcella goes, would she really have an affair with the son of the man that she claimed to love years ago? I guess this is a possibility considering how broken all of their lives were, but it just didn't add up for me.

Like I said earlier, I found that I couldn't put this book down for I had to see how this scenario was going to end. The most broken character in this novel appeared to be Callie and I wish we really would have gotten to hear more of her story, rather than focusing on Jed and Marcella's affair. This is one of those books where I can say I didn't find a liking for any of the characters, but I have found in the past that if the writing is good I can still find enjoyment of the book. I obviously did find a substantial amount of enjoyment but I didn't particularly like the writing style either. It didn't seem to flow well and was also a bit choppy for my taste. But after reflection of the storyline it could be that this is what the author meant to accomplish. ( )