The laughing place

by Pam Durban

Like the town they live in, Timmons, South Carolina, the Vesses are a peaceful model family. John Vess, attorney and pillar of the community, and Louise, his devoted wife, have conducted their lives seamlessly in a house that has belonged to the Vesses for generations. Now young, recently widowed Annie Vess has come home to comfort her mother after the shocking insult of he father's sudden death. But things are not the way Annie left them; Timmons is changing. A dam has flooded thousands of acres to create an artificial lake, Annie's cousin Mel is about to marry a man of highly questionable character, her mother seems to be relinquishing her common sense (and her soul) to a born-again sentimentality, and the old colonel next door is sinking inexorably into senility. Perhaps most alarming of all, Annie's memories of her father, valiant defender of lost causes, is threatened by her discovery that he led a double life. And Annie, for the first time since the death of her husband, embarks