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And then it was autumn again, and Saturdays they would wake early when the first clean light came up over the oak and fir at the top of the ridge and eased its way down across their glass house and overgrown slope, down to the pitched yards and shingled cottages along the street below their street, down across timber and brush and fallen limbs, across the boulevard all the way to the patient lake, where it would linger on the water, an ancient and forgiving light by noon.
These were cold mornings suddenly and so they dressed quickly in fraying clothes. One made coffee, the other swiped jam across toast. They traded sections of the paper. One started in on the crossword, the other scanned the financial pages. Then they headed out to the garage and pulled on work gloves and selected rakes and clippers, and there was little conversation except to agree the movie they had watched the night before was not sitting well with them. A simple story snapped when stretched into an epic. Actually one man fell asleep before the film ended, and the other man had to wake him only to guide him to the bedroom and back to sleep again.
Rain all week had left the air crisp but also made the ground behind their house muddy and not entirely suitable for the chore at hand, yet each man took a flank of hill as if it were his side of the bed and began pulling out the dead sage and trimming back the excess tea bush and clearing out the persistent sumac.
There was nothing to be done about the thicket of rosemary, they’d long since given up. There was enough of a drop-off down to the backyard of the property below theirs so that even at the edge of their land, they enjoyed an unobstructed vista of the Silver Lake Reservoir.
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"In his trademark crystalline prose, reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith, Gadol (Light at Dusk) vividly illustrates the universal themes of the stranger who comes to town, the quest for redemption, and the entanglement of deception."
—Booklist
"Gadol scores points about the importance of truth in enduring relationships."
—Publishers Weekly
"Silver Lake is compulsively readable, a novel that combines all the suspense of a psychological thriller with beautifully observed details of contemporary domestic life in Los Angeles. Peter Gadol captures the anxiety of living in a city where “the good life” – figs in the backyard, tennis in the afternoon – can at any moment be destroyed by a carjacking, a troubled stranger, a project that doesn’t come through. This is a haunting book full of both beauty and dread."
-Sarah Shun-lien Bynum | author of Ms. Hempel Chronicles
"Peter Gadol has written an astonishing book that poses essential questions about love, loyalty, and betrayal. Part mystery, part psychological drama, and gorgeously written, SILVER LAKE illuminates the darkest corners of the heart."
-Cristina Garcia | author of Handbook to Luck
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