COUNTRY BUSINESSMAN SEEKS RELIABLE WIFE. COMPELLED BY PRACTICAL REASONS. REPLY BY LETTER. Rural Wisconsin, 1907. In the bitter cold, Ralph Truitt, a successful industrialist, stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement. But when Catherine steps of the train she's not the woman that Ralph is expecting. She is both complex and devious. And, haunted by a terrible past, she is motivated by greed. Catherine's plan is simple. She will win Ralph's devotion. Later, she will leave him as a wealthy woman. What Catherine has not counted on however is that Ralph might have plans of his own for his new wife ...
"It was a story of a son who felt his one true birthright was to kill his father. It was the story of a father who could not undo a single gesture of his life, no matter the sympathies of his heart. It was a story of poison, poison that causes you to weep in your sleep, that comes to you first as a taste of ecstasy. It was a story of people who don’t choose life over death until it’s too late to know the difference, people whose goodness is forgotten, left behind like a child’s toy in a dusty playroom, people who see many things and remember only a handful of them and learn from even fewer, people who hurt themselves, who wreck their own lives and then go on to wreck the lives of those around them, who cannot be helped or assuaged by love or kindness or luck or charm, who forget kindness, the feeling and practice of it, and how it can save even the worst, most misshapen life from despair.
It was just a story about despair."
Right from the start, Goolrick shows us the people we are dealing with. Ralph Truitt is a quiet, steadfast, private, and powerful man who expects things to be as he wants them to be, even thinking he can control what time the train arrives. As Catherine Land dons a modest dress with her jewels sewn into the hem and throws her traveling clothes out the window of the train, we see she is not who we think she is, or who Ralph Truitt thinks she is. In many ways, she’s not even who she thinks she is. This is a story full of surprises, without being full of suspense. It certainly wasn’t the story I was expecting when I started, and it was even erotic at times. And a lot of strange things happen in this Wisconsin town in the long winter season. A tragedy is inevitable, but there is some redemption in the end. Along the way, we are treated to some beautiful prose and complex characters.
