Grace and Bob’s marriage is utterly miserable, but in the 1952 Missouri there was no divorce. And then one day a neighbour sees a handprint bruise, and in the sweltering heat of the summer, the gossip swiftly grows into something worse.

The characters are well described, the plot moves slowly but with inevitability towards the end, and the writing is gripping. The only story I can think to compare this to is Shirley Jackson’s ‘Lottery’ – an otherwise sane community engages in something utterly insane.

Each chapter tells the story of a different local family, starting with the Greeleys. As they discuss the local gossip and rumours, you get a view of the overall community and it is a threatening one. As the story goes on it follows the gossip as it spreads, and knowing the background of each character you can see how it will change and how each will react as the town slowly turns into a powder keg. The most striking feature is that even as the gossip spreads and grows, as each group contributes what they know to the picture – and it isn’t a pretty picture – the reader still knows that they only know part of the puzzle.

Making Bob Greeley as unsympathetic as he is initially is a good choice, as it keeps the reader hooked by making it seem upfront that his death would be justified. The problem is that all the later defences fail, when you know from the first page that Bob is a wife beater. His wife’s later attempted speech comes off more as Stockholm syndrome than righteous rage, and final death seems more like divine judgement that the townsfolk’s guilt. Forgetting that he beat her the moment he’s dead (the victim telling themselves “it’s not that bad”) is actually a pretty common reaction.

There is one other thing that does stand out, though I am not sure if it is unintended by the author, or simply subtle. If the men of the town had listened to the initial complaints of Bob wife-beating and intervened: a word from his boss for example, rather than telling their wives it didn’t matter, then events would not have escalated so far and Bob would still be alive.

There is only one formatting issue I spotted: Loc 1336 has an odd typo “F5” appears in the middle of a sentence without warning. Otherwise it is very, very, good.

A thought-provoking and carefully written short story that readers of drama and suspense fiction will enjoy, as will anyone who likes good writing.