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Author Maria Flook has half a dozen books to her credit. INVISIBLE EDEN is a case study of a 2002 murder that took place in Truro, Massachusetts on Cape Cod. The victim is Christa Worthington, daughter of a prominent old-line family. She has achieved fame, if not fortune, on her own merit as a fashion writer. She has written for such publications as Women's Wear Daily, Harper's Bazaar, the New York Times, London Independent and J. Crew.
Flook has lived in Truro, the remote end of the Outer Cape, a clam-strip wilderness that bonds her geographically and personally to the murdered 46-year-old. She identifies with Worthington's history. The words flow with a near biblical description of Truro. She says, "…for us, it's Eden. It's heaven on earth."
Her prime source of public information is First Assistant District Attorney Michael O'Keefe, with whom she develops a close relationship during the writing of INVISIBLE EDEN. He picks her brain for the "what ifs?" of the case. Flook places herself in the story with strong emotion that could taint a reader's viewpoint. However, her descriptions of setting and people read like a travelogue of the region. For true crime buffs, she gives a well-researched case study of Christa Worthington as victim but in no way attempts to solve the crime.
INVISIBLE EDEN is a story about a place and its compelling draw on a former resident who came home to roost. Worthington graduates from Vassar in the seventies as a member of the intelligentsia who bursts on the writing scene seeking notoriety. She introduces herself as "Christa Worthington, with Women's Wear Daily, so they would know what was what." John Fairchild, her boss at the magazine, gives her free rein to expound on Nouvelle society's fashionable soirees. Fairchild sends her to Paris in 1983 to work as fashion editor for the magazine; there, she mingles with the rich and famous and sends home tear sheets of her stories for her parents' approval.
Flook's research shows a mixed media portrait of the dead girl. Her mother was proud of her high-fashion journalism, but her father was not enthusiastic. Worthington seeks acceptance but never achieves it. She lives in a "halfway" world, always seeking something that she never finds. She is on the outside looking in, and allows herself to be used and abandoned by lovers circling the globe. When her mother dies of cancer, she comes home to roost in Truro with an agenda in mind. Motherhood is her goal. Ava is the product of her union with Tony Jackett, a married local man who becomes her obsession.
The scenes that describe Christa's feelings with subsequent action are emotional but take license with reality, because the author did not know the victim. She does put together a believable scenario of what might have happened, pieced together from friends' memories. The final pages hint at possible solutions to the crime that include Jackett, neighbor and former lover Tim Arnold, or an unknown perpetrator. All in all, INVISIBLE EDEN is a well-researched, bittersweet life story.
--- Reviewed by Judy Gigstad
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