The Lace Reader - Softcover

"Barry's modern-day story of Towner Whitney, who has the psychic gift to read the future in lace patterns, is complex but darker in subject matter.... The novel's gripping and shocking conclusion is a testament to Barry's creativity."--USA Today

"Finely rendered moments make this a novel to savor--a story as textured as it is imaginative... a story that readers will find as lovely as a swatch of handmade lace."--Rocky Mountain News

"Evocative, layered, smart, and astonishing, THE LACE READER is a fever dream of a novel that will haunt me for a long time to come. The Salem, Massachusetts that the Whitney women inhabit is a wild, dark place, and I loved every moment that I spent there."--Joshilyn Jackson, author of The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

"Suspenseful and literary catnip-for-book-clubs...while it's surprisingly gritty for having "lace" in the title, we're calling this now as the beach read of '08."--New York magazine

"Barry's depictions of her characters' altered states of consciousness are beautifully rendered. And "The Lace Reader" establishes Brunonia Barry as a force..."--The Olympian

"[For] fans of Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island, Chris Bohjalian's The Double Bind."--Booklist

"The Lace Reader unravels a magical, yet tragic family's tale...Barry has cleverly and delightfully set us up. With one fell swoop, she cuts the last thread, and the characters she has so carefully created unravel to reveal secrets we had not even begun to guess."--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Brunonia Barry has pulled off a major feat with her debut, The Lace Reader: It's a gorgeously written literary novel that's also a doozy of a thriller, capped with a jaw-dropping denouement that will leave even the most careful reader gasping."--Dallas Morning News

"[A] richly imagined saga of passion, suspense, and magic."--Time magazine

"A 'romance' in the Nathaniel Hawthorne sense of the word a dark tale of sin and guilt that blends the mundane and the fantastic, with a glimmer of redemptive hope at its core that all the Gothic trappings cannot obscure."--Tulsa World

Having left her hometown of Salem, Massachusetts, fifteen years ago under troubling circumstances, psychic Towner Whitney reluctantly returns after her eighty-five-year-old great-aunt Eva suddenly disappears and joins local cop John Rafferty in his investigation into the mystery. (Suspense)