The Cloud of Unknowing by Thomas H. Cook

This is one of those very few times I've felt wishy-washy about a book. It sounded intriguing to me when I read the back cover. I hadn't read anything by Cook before. David Sears narrates The Cloud of Unknowing with two different voices in alternating chapters. David is an average attorney, partner at an average law firm. He's always been in the shadow of his older and brilliant sister, Diana, and their father--also brilliant but also a paranoid schizophrenic--has made it very clear that David is lacking.

The book starts out with David's "you" voice, seemingly disembodied and removed from himself. He mentions a story written by Leo Tolstoy about the deaths of three people and how a sense of dread grows when one person is murdered and then another...and there is this anticipation, when is the third one going to happen? David reveals he is talking to Detective Petrie. David seems to be a material witness or a suspect to ... what? Murder? And whose? The "you" David slowly spins the story of madness, grief and ...is it murder? The second David speaks in the more normal and attached to reality "I" voice. He adds to the details "you" David parcels out.

Diana was devoted to caring for her mad and brilliant father for almost all of her life. After his death, she falls in love and marries but the son she bears seems to bear the taint--"it's in the blood"--of mental illness. The boy drowns and it's ruled an accidental death...or was it an accident? Diana is obsessed with learning the truth and draws David's young daughter Patty into the increasingly weird investigation.

I'm trying to get a handle on why it is I didn't love the book. There was lots of mystery and suspense. It's pretty obvious almost from the get-go that we're supposed to think that the grief stricken Diana is losing her mind. The more I read, especially of what "you" David was telling the detective, the more I wondered who might have really gotten the schizophrenia gene. Keep that Tolstoy story in mind because I'd forgotten and it does foreshadow what's to come in this story. How many deaths were there? And how many were murders?

One thing I'm not wishy washy about: I didn't care for the title. There's no zing to it and I probably wouldn't have picked it up at all were it not for the fingertips reaching up out of the water. The title is very blah and I wonder what Cook and his editor/agent/publisher was thinking?

I liked the book enough that I wanted to read others written by Thomas H. Cook. Check it out and see if you like it!