Crystal Springs
While friendships grow and change over time, secrets can't keep true friends apart
about Don Lesser
Don Lesser received his MFA in Fiction from the University of Massachusetts. His food articles have won awards at the Greenbrier Symposium for Professional Food Writers. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with his wife and family. Crystal Springs is his first novel to be published.
Crystal Springs
While friendships grow and change over time, secrets can't keep true friends apart
Steven Bennett is a historian, chef, and programmer in the quaint rural towns of the Pioneer Valley. Rejected by his first love, he marries another woman and lives an ordinary life hosting barbecues and tip-toeing around a past extramarital affair. When Suzi Carpenter, the young woman who may or may not be his daughter, dies of a suspected overdose, Steven’s whole life, and the town, is upended. Set upon the backdrop of lush hills in Western Massachusetts, Steven embarks on a quest to discover what, or perhaps who, killed Suzi, only to unearth buried scars
and hard truths about old friends.
review
“In Don Lesser’s debut novel, he has created Steven Bennett, the everyman character who finds a world of poets and artists as he searches for his own perch in a forty-year journey. If Steven thinks he can subdue the power of the past, he has underestimated the long game that the past plays, especially for those he loves. Peril simmers beneath the surface in Crystal Springs.”
—Jacqueline Sheehan, author of The Tiger in the House and five other novels