Say This: Two Novellas

Levine (The Wicked Tongue) delivers a harrowing pair of novellas recounting the aftermath of a murder. In “Eva Hurries Home,” the 41-year-old title character gets the first of several emails from a famous journalist living in Washington State. He wants to talk about Eva’s relationship with her cousin, Duane, now in prison in Oregon for kidnapping and murder 13 years earlier. Eva agrees to visit her cousin, and their encounter skids her across memories of their unhappy, volatile childhoods, which at one point involved a sexual relationship. The details aren’t clear to the reader, but the pain they cause her is. “Son One” follows Adrian, the man Duane kidnapped and robbed before killing him; it’s narrated by four of Adrian’s relatives, beginning with Lenore-May, Adrian’s stepmother, as the characters relive the news of his death, the trial itself, and its impact on their own families. Old wounds open up as they try to understand: “You can’t live the rest of your life missing someone who’s not there,” Lenore-May says. Though less coherent than the first entry—the characters’ relationships to one another are not always clear—the second manages to sharply convey the jarring effect of an unexpected death on a family. It’s a little wobbly, but it still packs a punch. (Mar.)