Unsettled States

A Peeping Tom. A psychiatrist who hears everything. A detective who believes in nothing. And a priest everyone trusts.

In the coastal Connecticut town of Granville, Detective Gerry Mallory has a delicate problem. Bradley Davis, a quiet, brilliant librarian, has been caught staring through a neighbor's window. Mallory doesn't charge him. He sends Bradley to Dr. Caroline Singer, a psychiatrist with a sharp wit and only one rule: tell the truth.

But Granville is full of people watching each other.

Behind the windows Bradley spied through, two respected marriages are quietly falling apart. A wrongfully convicted professor comes back into the world after twelve years behind bars. Then a beloved local woman is found strangled in her home, and a town that thought it knew itself starts to look at its neighbors with suspicion.

As Bradley's sessions on the couch dig into a past, he has spent his life avoiding, Mallory follows a trail that runs through bedrooms, barrooms, and the parish pulpit. There he finds secrets that some people would kill to keep buried.

Unsettled States is an elegant, darkly funny whodunit about desire, guilt, faith, and the masks we wear, from the author Norman Mailer praised as "a writer with an exceptional point of view."

Step through the window. Just be careful what you see.