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Books: Robert Stone’s thriller “Death of the Black-Haired Girl”

Ah, to finish the year grieving the end of a book: Robert Stone’s Death of the Black-Haired Girl. This is a town-and-gown noir thriller, not at all Stone’s usual fare. I loved it.

“A cloud of resentment,” Maud Stack is a beautiful brainiac undergraduate in love with her advisor, Steven Brookman. It’s mutual — but Brookman ends the affair, clumsily. His wife, returned from a visit to her Saskatchewan home, is pregnant. They had wanted another child; this news seems a blessing.

Maud is a swirl of anger, about a lot of things. It’s not just Brookman. It’s the right-to-lifers picketing outside the local hospital, about whom she writes an incendiary piece hastily published in the college newspaper. It’s her retired New York City cop father, who milks his brief appearance at the 9/11 Twin Towers. It’s her mother gone, died young.

She has friends, good ones: her roommate Shelby, a starlet ducking Hollywood for an education. Also Jo, a former nun who runs the college counseling center. Each tries, and fails, to keep Maud from her end.

Distraught and drunk, Maud confronts Brookman outside his home; they struggle, sending them into a street crowded with fans leaving a college hockey game. A car hits Maud; in a flash, she’s dead.

Did the professor kill her?

Of course not. But Brookman suffers. He will lose his job. Maud’s cop father seeks vengeance.

“He did not believe that he had killed Maud by loving her…. Still, there was some kind of blood debt, something to be endured as a result of what happened … a mystery he was compelled to live out.”

This is a rich, compact read. Beautifully told.

My sole complaint: I wanted more. More Maud, more Shelby, more Jo, more Mary Pick, the dean’s wife, a practicing Catholic who ensures Maud is put to rest beside her mother.

Stone, who’s 76, is known for longer, prize-winning fiction about men and war and international adventure, including Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award in 1975.

This is his first thriller.

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