Before the Devil Fell by Neil Olson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The second book this summer set in/near Ipswich (the first was
The Chain - is there something going on? Anyway, this one does a decent job of placing the action in a small town near enough to a bigger town and even bigger city, with all the claustrophobic "everyone knows everything about everybody" small towns engender. The everyone in this case are members of the Seven Families, a group that seem to have migrated from Wales to England to Maine (back when Maine was still part of Massachusetts) and then to Massachusetts. Some - a few - have escaped to other parts of the country, but there are enough still in town to know each other's business.
That business seems to have something to do with a spirit circle and Something That Went Very Wrong when Will was five years old. Decades later it's still a problem that must be dealt with, and Will knows just enough to get in trouble yet not enough to really figure things out. As always, there are problems that could have been solved if people just actually explained things and/or asked questions. To be honest, that's one of the weaker parts of this book, the explaining the Seven Families and what they do or how they interact (or not). Added to that are some flat characters that are difficult to connect with, and you get three stars.
eARC provided by publisher.