Secrets Keep

Despite some finely styled writing, Sillitoe (Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders) never manages to draw together the disparate stories and characters in this novel. Caitlin Findlay is a magazine editor and writer in Utah who has made a name for herself with articles about a psychopath named James Hubbard. Caitlin's brother Roger has disappeared, which for Caitlin, her funky sister Marly and her Martha Stewart-perfect sister Barbara, recalls the death (a possible suicide) of another brother, Boyd. (One recurring temporal confusion is that the time elapsed between Boyd's death and Roger's disappearance is fuzzy throughout most of the novel.) Barbara is busy trying to organize a video and party for their parents' wedding anniversary, and Marly is carrying on a secret affair with a married black man. Each of these stories comes to its own end, but they rarely intertwine, and the opportunity for Caitlin to do some interesting sleuthing with a detective who is working on both her brother's disappearance and some new information about James Hubbard is lost when instead she begins to get important information through dreams and visions. It takes much too long for these family members to come to the realization that Boyd was gay, and even then they persist in the idea that he killed himself not because he was oppressed, but because as a gay man, it would have been torture for him to go on the ""mission"" required of Mormon men, since intimacy with other men would certainly have caused him to cross the line of propriety. Even though they are family, these characters never really connect. Instead, their lives merely intersect in the service of the novel. (Mar.)