FEBRUARY 2014 - AudioFile
Tandy Cronyn is simply outstanding in her portrayal of this powerful and chilling story based upon the real-life murders of a number of widows, including Asta Eicher and her children, at the hands of serial killer Cornelius Pierson, who preyed on women answering lonely hearts ads in the 1930s. Cronyn expertly builds the story's tension, slowly revealing the anticipation tinged with desperation of Mrs. Eicher as she unknowingly leads her family to their inevitable and terrifying end. Cronyn is equally effective portraying the elegant Emily Thornhill, the Chicago reporter who helped bring Pierson to justice. This is a moving, tragic, complicated story well presented and well written, which gives new depth to cold terror. A.C.P. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
The Philadelphia Review of Books - Erin McKnight
A novel of compelling impressions…Triumphant…[Jayne Anne Phillips is] perceptive enough to hear, and respond to, the smallest of humanity’s sounds.
O, the Oprah Magazine - Arianna Davis
Hauntingly imagines the victims’ hopes, dreams, and terror…Phillips blends fact and fiction in a darkly poetic way: The result is an absorbing novel that leaves us rooting for the heroine Emily becomes—and mourning the lives the Eichers never got to enjoy.
Tampa Bay Times - Colette Bancroft
Sometimes eerie and dreamlike, others grippingly tense, yet warmly human, always written with beauty and emotional power, Quiet Dell is a virtuoso performance by a highly original writer.
Booklist - Brad Hooper
The truth of all of Phillips’ characterizations is what lies behind this careful novel’s compelling momentum.
Vogue
Jayne Anne Phillips’s unsettling latest, Quiet Dell, spins out from a true crime story involving a 1930s-era-seducer—think Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter—who preys on a widow and her children.
Miami Herald - Amy Driscoll
Phillips’ extensive reporting—she quotes from newspaper stories, letters between Eicher and her ‘suitor’ and the trial transcript—gives the book its considerable heft. And her creation of a Chicago reporter named Emily Thornhill helps to frame the story of the eight-decade-old event in a fresh way. Quiet Dell is a smart combination of true crime, history and fiction tied together with Phillips’ seamlessly elegant writing….As the book proceeds to its dark conclusion, Emily offers readers a glimpse of light.
Associated Press
An extraordinary achievement, a mesmerizing blend of fact and fiction that borrows from the historical record, including trial transcripts and newspaper accounts, but is cloaked in the shimmering language of a poet.
The New Yorker
Compelling…Richly imagined…Phillips’s achievement is to reveal how intimately cruelty and kindness unfold.
Chicago Tribune - Celia McGee
Phillips, an acclaimed writer of largely contemporary fiction, this time draws on history: a criminal case from the early '30s.…But if the factual underpinnings of this latest novel are unusual for Phillips, her ability to transform them into a fictionalized narrative place her at the top of her form. Phillips has carefully inserted imagined private moments and just a few fictional characters to create a story both splendid and irreparably sad… As Phillips has proved throughout her decades of fiction writing, there is evil in the world, but there are some who will stand in its way.
Vanity Fair - Elissa Schappell
In Quiet Dell, Phillips mesmerizingly spins together fact and fiction, vividly imagining the circumstances leading to their deaths, and sets a young female reporter on the case to solve it.
Colm Tóibín
Quiet Dell has all the elements of a murder mystery, but its emotional scope is larger and more complex. It combines a strange, hypnotic and poetic power with the sharp tones of documentary evidence. It offers a portrait of rural America in a time of crisis and dramatizes the lives of a number of characters who are fascinating and memorable.
The Great Gray Bridge - Philip Turner
A mesmerizing novel drawn from the annals of infamous true crime…Meticulous, engrossing and spellbinding.
Stephen King
In a brilliant fusion of fact and fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips has written the novel of the year. It’s the story of a serial killer’s crimes and capture, yes, but it's also a compulsively readable story of how one brave woman faces up to acts of terrible violence in order to create something good and strong in the aftermath. Quiet Dell will be compared to In Cold Blood, but Phillips offers something Capote could not: a heroine who lights up the dark places and gives us hope in our humanity.
Minneapolis Star Tribune - Mark Athitakis
Gripping…Chilling…The novel’s heartbeat is Emily, a Chicago Tribune reporter covering Powers’ arrest and trial…Quiet Dell does what Emily can’t, thoughtfully grafting a 21st-century sensibility onto 20th-century ghastliness. Emily resists the fetters placed on her as a journalist and a woman, while Eric, a gay photographer who accompanies her, is a keen observer of closeted life in the South. Phillips exposes the era’s prejudices less to render judgment than to show how cannily people like Emily and Eric worked around them.
Boston Globe - Leah Hager Cohen
Phillips’s effort to do justice — aesthetic and moral — to the victims feels bold and honorable...moving, even transporting…Phillips allows her own ample gifts to soar.
Portland Oregonian - Jeff Baker
Jayne Anne Phillips is one of the finest pure stylists in contemporary literature, and she’s found a story that sounds like a perfect match for her talents.
The Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks
[Quiet Dell’s] success is due to a bold decision: Ms. Phillips has written a serial killer novel in which the serial killer hardly appears….Unabashed…There is a glowing beauty to the book’s brave, generous version of history.
Colm Tóibín
Quiet Dell has all the elements of a murder mystery, but its emotional scope is larger and more complex. It combines a strange, hypnotic and poetic power with the sharp tones of documentary evidence. It offers a portrait of rural America in a time of crisis and dramatizes the lives of a number of characters who are fascinating and memorable.
The New Yorker
Compelling…Richly imagined…Phillips’s achievement is to reveal how intimately cruelty and kindness unfold.
Associated Press Staff
An extraordinary achievement, a mesmerizing blend of fact and fiction that borrows from the historical record, including trial transcripts and newspaper accounts, but is cloaked in the shimmering language of a poet.
FEBRUARY 2014 - AudioFile
Tandy Cronyn is simply outstanding in her portrayal of this powerful and chilling story based upon the real-life murders of a number of widows, including Asta Eicher and her children, at the hands of serial killer Cornelius Pierson, who preyed on women answering lonely hearts ads in the 1930s. Cronyn expertly builds the story's tension, slowly revealing the anticipation tinged with desperation of Mrs. Eicher as she unknowingly leads her family to their inevitable and terrifying end. Cronyn is equally effective portraying the elegant Emily Thornhill, the Chicago reporter who helped bring Pierson to justice. This is a moving, tragic, complicated story well presented and well written, which gives new depth to cold terror. A.C.P. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
