By the #1 bestselling author of Under the Tuscan Sun, Bella Tuscany and In Tuscany, Swan is a haunting novel set in the deep South -- a resonant tale of long-buried family secrets and mysteries brought suddenly to light. In her celebrated memoirs of life in Tuscany, Frances Mayes writes masterfully about people in a powerful and shaping place. In Swan , her first novel, she has created an equally intimate world, rich with striking characters and intriguing twists of fate, that hearkens back to her southern roots. The Masons are a prominent but now fragmented family who have lived for generations in Swan, an edenic, hidebound small town in Georgia. As Swan opens, a bizarre crime pulls Ginger Mason home from her life as an archeologist in Italy: The body of her mother, Catherine, a suicide nineteen years before, has been mysteriously exhumed. Reunited on new terms with her troubled, isolated brother J.J., who has never ventured far from Swan, the Mason children grapple with the profound effects of their mother's life and death on their own lives. When a new explanation for Catherine’s death emerges, and other closely guarded family secrets rise to the surface as well, Ginger and J.J. are confronted with startling truths about their family, a particular ordeal in a family and a town that wants to keep the past buried. Beautifully evoking the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of the deep South while telling an utterly compelling story of the complexity of family ties, Swan marks the remarkable fiction debut of one of America’s best-loved writers. It seems like there's a law that every novel set below the Mason-Dixon Line must feature a family secret, a beautiful dead mother, and a contested paternity. Also, iced tea. Swan , the debut novel from memoirist Frances Mayes ( Under the Tuscan Sun , Bella Tuscany ), is pretty standard stuff. J.J. Mason lives like a hermit in the woods outside the town of Swan, Georgia; his sister Ginger Mason works as an archaeologist in Italy. Their family has been in Swan forever; the whole town mourned when Caroline, Ginger, and J.J.'s mother committed suicide. Now the town joins in shock when Caroline's body is mysteriously and crudely exhumed. Ginger returns from Italy; J.J. comes into town. Over the course of a week in July 1975, and against a backdrop of townspeople, relatives, gossipy old biddies, and mill workers, the siblings explore the dark history of their mother's death. The book is competently done, and Mayes is clearly enjoying her break from the Tuscan sun--she especially seems to enjoy folksy-yet-Gothic Southernisms: "Who'd ever think someone that pretty could up and die? ... Just goes to show how quick it is from can to can't." Despite the book's grisly grave-digging, though, Mayes unearths nothing new. --Claire Dederer Fans of Mayes's memoirs about her life in Italy (Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany) will not be disappointed by her first novel, which is set in a backwater town in Mayes's native Georgia. The Masons are the richest family in Swan, but their money couldn't protect them from tragedy. When Ginger and her brother J.J. were children, their beautiful and loving mother committed suicide; their father suffered a stroke soon afterwards, and the children were raised by their Aunt Lily. Now in their thirties, Ginger works as an archaeologist in Tuscany, while J.J. spends most of his time hunting and fishing. But all that changes when their mother's grave is ransacked, and the subsequent investigation proves beyond a doubt that Catherine Mason was actually murdered. As Ginger and J.J. begin to unravel the truth about the past, they also begin to accept their own and others' weaknesses. Mayes clearly never met a quirky character she didn't like, and she's seemingly put every one of them in this book, whether or not they move the plot forward (and most do not). This slows down the pace considerably, especially because these secondary characters aren't well delineated. With that caveat, this remains a solid read, sure to please readers who enjoy Southern fiction. Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. Mayes, author of the very popular nonfiction accounts Under the Tuscan Sun (1996) and Bella Tuscan (1999), grounds her first novel in her childhood home of Georgia. The small town of Swan, chartered by John Mason and reigned over by his son, Big Jim, was rocked by the suicide in 1956 of Catherine Mason, wife of Big Jim's doctor son, Wills, and mother of 14-year-old J. J and 12-year-old Ginger, who found her mother's body. When Catherine's grave is desecrated and her body exhumed 19 years later, the event turns from tragic to cathartic when an investigation shows that she was murdered, lifting the pall of shame, anger, guilt, and fear from her family. J. J and Ginger had kept a close bond even though their lives had taken different directions; loner J. J., a mostly absent property manager,