Cook’s latest atmospheric tale is framed around the frustrations and aspirations of Lucas Page, a middle-aged historian who has just arrived in St. Louis to hawk his new book,
Fatal Choices. A deeply disconsolate man, Lucas feels as though he’s never been able to write the deeply sentient books it was his dream to create. At the core of Lucas’s problems is a bitter past that
has been simmering under the surface for many years.
When his teenage nemesis, Lola Faye Gilroy, suddenly appears at his book signing, Lucas
senses again this blooming seed of bitterness. Dark rings around her once-inky blue eyes and wrinkles on her lips, Lola’s unflinching gaze gives Lucas a heightened physical unease; no one but Lola can stop Lucas’s heart and chill his soul.
From this point, Cook assembles his drama as though on an epic and tragic “redneck Shakespearean stage.” Lola Faye is the facilitator for all of Lucas’s anxious memories: his father lying in a pool of blood; Lola Faye’s husband in another; Lucas’s mother splayed out lifeless on her bed; and the ostensibly innocent machinations of Lola Faye herself, buxom and blond, for whom Lucas’s father had evidently been willing to cast aside his son and his wife.
Peering into the hidden, fractured depths of Lucas’s tumultuous past, Cook creates a crystallized nightmare. Using fragments of conversation, the author builds a hotbed of dark noir, violence and scandal as the longings of an idealistic and ambitious young Lucas are gradually exposed. Lucas aches to escape the all-consuming drabness of Glenville, Alabama, his ramshackle hometown, and to finally bury the memories of his father's sordid fling with an ignorant shop girl in a makeshift bedroom with a plywood roof and cardboard for a bed.
There’s a moment of unreality as Lola Faye’s words tighten around Lucas like a noose, this
former object "of his father’s grimy desire." The tension is almost palpable as they sit drinking
pinot noir, Lola later diffidently sampling an appletini, laughing and shaking her head playfully, making a joke at Luke’s expense and “aching to talk about old times.”
This iconic meeting with Lola Faye challenges Lucas’s most basic assumptions about her infidelity, along with the narrow, myopic nature of his father’s existence and his startling lack of worldliness, where the only hope for Lucas was inheriting the
shabby family-owned five-and-dime.
In his trademark effortless prose, Cook captures the essence of Lucas’s yearnings, his love for his ailing mother and his desire to “ go north” and get an education at a storied university where he can write his grand works of history. Ironically, Lola’s clever mockery and sly asides cloud Lucas’s grim and false suspicions. Along with a surprise twist, Lola Faye ends up shattering Lucas's deep-seated perceptions of his past that for years have seemed so out of his control.