Season of the Snake by Claire Davis

From the Publisher

One of the Best Books for Reading Groups, Kirkus Reviews

Years after the tragic death of her first husband, Nance Able remarries and begins a new life in the West with Ned, a school principal whose quiet charm lulls her to contentment. A scientist tracking rattlesnakes in the wilderness of Hells Canyon, Idaho, Nance courts natural dangers, believing that conquering such risks will protect her from further grief. But at home, she is unaware that her husband’s secret proclivities are emerging. When Nance’s younger, errant sister Meredith moves to town, Ned can no longer suppress the terrifying mysteries of his past, and the sisters must find together the strength to survive his love.

Library Journal

Snakes figure prominently in this follow-up to Winter Range, which won a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. Nance is a herpetologist studying rattler migration along the Snake River in Idaho and Washington. A snake is also a treacherous, insidious person, and it is readily apparent that Nance's charming but staid school principal second husband, Ned, is hiding some major psychological dysfunction. When Nance's reckless younger sister Meredith moves nearby, Ned's careful equilibrium teeters, and his behavior becomes increasingly erratic and violent, like a snake whose nest has been disturbed. Meredith has a history of abusive relationships, and Nance secretly blames her for inadvertently causing the death of Nance's first love. The tension between the sisters is palpable, and it's only when Ned turns on Nance that she is able to feel empathy for Meredith. Ned's back story lacks depth, but vivid scenery and a tangible impression of ominous menace will appeal to fans of literary psychological suspense. For Northwest fiction collections.-Christine Perkins, Burlington P.L., WA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Second-novelist Davis (Winter Range, 2000) presents another powerful and suspenseful tale that taps the violent side of masculine nature. Back home in Mississippi, where they grew up, sisters Meredith and Nance didn't have a lot of luck with men: drawn chronically to battering, abusive lovers, Meredith would end up in the emergency room, while the older Nance, cool-headed and focused, became a distraught widow when the love of her life, her husband Joe, was struck down by hoodlums in the park. After moving to Lewiston, Idaho, to pursue her work as a herpetologist, and after marrying an elementary school principal, Nance finally seems blessed, even when her sister and harbinger of grief also moves to Lewiston. Meredith doesn't trust men, and certainly not Nance's husband, Ned, whose reticence about himself leaves her feeling he's withholding "some knowledge exclusively in his keeping." Davis gradually builds suspense from this "withheld knowledge," tracking both Nance as she hunts snakes on wilderness trips to identify and bag them for the lab, and creepy husband Ned as he disappears for increasingly longer periods of time on shadowy errands-moving from peeping Tom to bona fide sex criminal. Besides an occasional heavy-handedness on the snake metaphor (Nance "shed[s] the scales from her eyes"), Davis's writing is masterful, revealing a deft sense of relationships-including sisterly love-that are sometimes so stiflingly close that they exclude other people, as in Ned's case, and sometimes so volatile that they're capable of creating vicious resentment. Nance's first marriage to Joe is tenderly, heartbreakingly depicted before it vanishes like a dream, while her second, to the orderly,attentive Ned, is carefully and skillfully delineated. Moreover, Davis isn't afraid to provoke some compelling questions about violence against women and the guilt subsequently felt by the victim. A chilling peek into the snake-charmer's pit. Regional author tour. Agent: Sally Wofford-Girand/Elaine Markson Agency

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