I borrowed this book from a friend recently, because she had such a different reaction to it than another friend did. When she lent it to me, she warned me "it's disturbing". I plunged ahead anyway, and immediately got drawn into Paul's world, and loved his memories of Lexy and his relationship with Lorelei. Where it took a bad turn for me (and for the friend who didn't like it) was Paul's brief and albeit peripherary involvement with the Cerberus Society. I almost put the book down at that point; I was so angry at Paul for even considering such a thing, and so angry at the author for making me care about these characters only to have one turn into a monster. But, I decided to keep going and give Paul a chance- if he got involved with them, I'd put it down. If he saw how sick they were and moved on, I'd keep reading.

I'm glad I did, because once that part was over with, I went back to loving the book. In fact I found it very touching.

A man comes home one night and learns his wife has died. It seems she fell from a tree in their backyard, and the police immediately rule it an accident.

However, the man isn't so sure it was an accident, suspecting it may have been suicide. The only person to witness her death was their dog. In a desperate attempt to learn the truth, he becomes obsessed with teaching the dog to speak.

Throughout the book, we're shown pieces from their relationship together, and soon learn that his wife was depressed, and mentally unstable. This makes us, too, wonder if it was an accident, or not.

As funny as the premise sounded to me, the story was very sad, showing a desperate man searching for answers and relief.

When Paul Iverson discovers that his wife has died in a fall from a tree, he does something unusual. Suspecting that her death was not an accident—there are odd clues, like the reshuffled books on the shelf—he uses his training as a linguist to try to teach their dog, Lorelei, to talk so that he can reconstruct Lexy's last hours. But then Paul contacts a man convicted of operating on dogs to install vocal chords, and what had been a poignant, affecting tale turns truly frightening. I hated this part of the book and was relieved when Paul put that idea to rest. It was a relief also when Paul finally dealt with his grief and just let his dog be a dog.

This book is the first by this author that I have read. I really enjoyed the book up until the last chapter and just didn't like the way the book ended. I suppose I was looking for something more and it didn't materialise.

Blurb:
Walking through new-fallen snow in the forest near their home, twelve year old Nicky Dillon and her father come upon something inconceivable there, in the pristine winter scene, an abandoned infant wails, its survival made possible only by the coincidence of their having chosen this path for their evening stroll.

One of this talented author's lesser efforts -- I read everything by Anita Shreve, but this one did not measure up.

Not long before Christmas 1983, 12-year-old Nicky Dillon and her father Robert, walking in the woods near their house in New Hampshire, come across a baby girl wrapped in a bloody towel, the remnants of her umbilical cord still attached. They race her to the hospital, she survives, and the police launch a hunt for the parents. The Dillons' discovery opens the still-fresh wound inflicted on a mid-December day two years earlier when Nicky's mother and one-year-old sister Clara were killed in a car crash. Robert fled Westchester with his daughter, hoping to escape their memories in rural isolation. When the infant's 19-year-old mother turns up, he doesn't want to have anything to do with her, but he finds he can't turn her in either when a convenient fainting spell and blizzard trap Charlotte in their house. Looking back on these events at age 30—for no evident reason except to give us some reassuring flash-forwards at the close—Nicky mingles the gradual unfolding of Charlotte's story (the rotten father exposed the baby and lied to her about it) with her memories of Mom and Clara and her worries about Dad. A sympathetic local detective's gradual closing in on Charlotte provides the not-very-suspenseful plot movement. The whole tale seems contrived, right down to Nicky's climactic, too-pat confrontation with her father. "Are you just trying to stay sad? To hold on to Mom and Clara?" do not seem like the insights of a 12-year-old. Everything is too easy here, including the fact that we never meet the boy who actually left the newborn to die, so readers can feel comfortably sorry for everyone without having to grapple with any messy moral issues.

I believe this was the first book by Shreve that I read. It was an intense read about a girl that leaves her baby out in the woods to die and the family that comes to take care of it. We had a good discussion about it in my book club.