God in Concord

By Jonathan Swift

Homer suspects a rash of deaths near Walden Pond may not be accidental.

Alice Snow is the first to die. In the morning, she and her friends at the Pond View Trailer Park watchsoap operas, worrying about the lives of TV's rich and powerful. A few hours later, a hiking Homer Kelly finds Alice lying outside her trailer, head smashed and heart stopped. Though her fellow Pond View residents do not realize it, their lives are in danger too.

The state-owned park sits on Walden Pond, just north of the replica of Thoreau's log cabin. Where the philosopher once retreated to find nature is now a hive of humanity -- hemmed in by a highway, a landfill, and the planned site of a new mini-mall. The trailer park stands in the developers' way, and when more Pond View residents die, Homer suspects murder. The developers have no qualms about killing Concord's past -- might they murder its present too?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784086626

Jonathan Swift

Born in 1667, Jonathan Swift was an Irish writer and cleric, best known for his works Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal, and A Journal to Stella, amongst many others. Educated at Trinity College in Dublin, Swift received his Doctor of Divinity in February 1702, and eventually became Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Publishing under the names of Lemeul Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, and M. B. Drapier, Swift was a prolific writer who, in addition to his prose works, composed poetry, essays, and political pamphlets for both the Whigs and the Tories, and is considered to be one of the foremost English-language satirists, mastering both the Horatian and Juvenalian styles. Swift died in 1745, leaving the bulk of his fortune to found St. Patrick’s Hospital for Imbeciles, a hospital for the mentally ill, which continues to operate as a psychiatric hospital today.

Reviews for God in Concord

[thornton37814 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What happens when a group of developers and environmentalists are at odds in Concord, Massachusetts? Residents of a trailer park near Thoreau's Walden Pond begin to die. Having just visited Concord and having re-read several of Thoreau's works including Walden recently, I really connected with this novel. I've not always been a fan of Langton's fiction, but this one kept me interested to the very end.