BookBrowse Reviews The House on Buzzards Bay by Dwyer Murphy

BookBrowse:

Dwyer Murphy delivers a slick gothic thriller set on the New England coast.

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If Jim's parents hadn't died when he was a teenager, the house on Buzzards Bay would have passed to them. Instead, at age 25 and just out of law school, Jim finds himself alone with the keys. Though young, he instinctively knows what to do with his inheritance: split ownership equally among himself and his four closest friends—Rami, Maya, Shannon, and Bruce. The five, who met at college, have formed, for Jim, the family he had lost. So it seems natural to him that they should all share this sliver of the New England coastline and use it as a base for their subsequent summer get-togethers.

They're the sort of well-heeled group who feel at home in a nineteenth-century beach-front mansion. Although all trained to be diplomats, only Rami has entered the world of international bureaucracy. Jim practices law, and Maya has become an art teacher; at the moment she's also looking after her partner Shannon, heavily pregnant with the couple's first child. Bruce, the black sheep of the friend group, is the author of a widely read series of books in which a philosophy professor saves the world from a string of "grave conspiracies." The series has made him rich and reasonably famous, but his friends have a habit of turning their noses up at his particular brand of pulp fiction. As the group approaches 40, their busy lives ensure they meet up at the house far less regularly than they did in their 20s—but this year, by some stroke of luck, all five are free to spend the entire summer together. Cue long, hot days with only alcohol and each other for company.

The House on Buzzards Bay would risk being yet another rehash of The Big Chill for a new generation, except for author Dwyer Murphy's more sinister sensibilities. While he utilizes all the hidden secrets and jealous rivalries that are the standard fare of "friend group" fiction, he also feeds a deeper unease into the story. Tensions bubbling to the surface and a fist fight on the Fourth of July are to be expected from the genre; even after Bruce takes off without a word one evening, his friends assume he's being melodramatic and needs his space. But when, a few days later, the gang returns from a trip into town to find a young Frenchwoman called Camille sitting in the kitchen, claiming Bruce invited her before he vanished, Jim gets the definite impression that something is not quite right. No one remembers hearing anything about any invite, but who would kick out someone so charming, worldly, and seductive? Sure enough, it isn't long before this stranger has insinuated herself into the lives—and, as it turns out, beds—of the friend group.

A slim novel at under 300 pages, The House on Buzzards Bay is a slow burner all the same. Murphy is more interested in crafting an atmosphere than a plot; his focus is on carefully stacking up moments of uncertainty, each one knocking the Dutch angle of Jim's narration even more off-kilter. What's Rami been telling Jim's wife that he's not been telling him? Who's been sleeping in the house in the off-season? And why won't Bruce answer his phone? While Murphy's deadpan style has a tendency to frustrate in the novel's first half, it pays off to a large extent in the second, after Camille's sudden appearance. In true gothic fashion, her arrival also brings the revelation that the house was built by Jim's ancestors as a home for the region's once-burgeoning Spiritualist community—one of the many "small, hopeful offshoots" putting utopian ideas to the test in nineteenth-century America (see Beyond the Book). Not unexpectedly, however, a séance in homage to his forebears does nothing to put Jim's mind at ease.

After An Honest Living and The Stolen Coast—two novels steeped in hardboiled neo-noir—The House on Buzzards Bay is something of a departure for Murphy, editor-in-chief of the CrimeReads website. Jim may have the vague foreboding that some grave crime has been committed somewhere along the line, but the novel is much more in the vein of brooding gothic horror than detective-led thriller. Nonetheless, just as the house's past owners seem to haunt its corridors long after their deaths, Murphy's tale of a summer gone terribly wrong has the potential to haunt his readers long after the final page.

This review first ran in the July 2, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.