Like many "true crime" books purporting to understand psychological aspects of killer and/or victims, especially those set in close-knit communities, this one drew a lot of ire from locals who pointed out what they believed to be factual inaccuracies. I don't expect such books to be true or condemn them when they aren't; what interests me is what kind of story the author draws, with what details, and what events surrounded the writing of the book that may have made the story seem important to tell.

This book is really atmospheric, darkly so. The aspect of the book that demonstrated the increasing difficulties of family farmers was informative and meaningful (particularly to someone who remembers the farm crises of the 1980's American Midwest). The book also fits with a less savory aspect of the general time in which it was written, when sexual deviance was almost invariably integrated into any narrative about poor mental health and yet when people had a profound fascination with - and an expectation of deviant behaviors within - closed communities, especially if the communities being depicted weren't using up-to-date technology. In this book's case, the technology not being up to date and the sexuality being suspect were the two things the neighbors claimed weren't true.

So, basically, one ought to understand the book as coming from the same broad cultural impulse that created the popularity of V. C. Andrews and books like hers. This one is written better, but still serves more as a guilty indulgence in secretive horrors than as a psychological investigation of the devastating dark side of feeling bound to and fearing losing the family farm. ( )

What could have been a lurid tale of murder and madness becomes in Cornwell's hands a elegant elegy for an eccentric family and a lost way of life. Robert, Alan and Frances Luxton, 2 brothers and a sister from an ancient farming family in Devon, England, died violently in the mid-1970's. Though this true tale was well (and sensationally) documented by the British press at the time, the story is probably unknown to most American readers. Cornwell journeyed to Devon to ostensibly uncover the mystery of their deaths. Instead, as he interviews neighbors and friends in the isolated community, he assembles a portrait of not only Robert, Alan and Frances, but of their once wealthy family, its tragedies and eccentricities. The Luxton family becomes a detail in the landscape of an almost vanished way of life in one of the most mysterious corners of England. ( )

This is by far one of the best accounts of a triple murder. Some parts of it are too much focusing on writer's own person but in whole the subject is handled with piety and thoroughness. ( )