Lynn York, The Piano Teacher

Fifty-something Wilma Mabry lives an ordered life—apron donned when preparing dinner, linen closet just so, and, always, the adoption of a supremely polite, even ostensibly indifferent exterior. This brand of southern gentility and a reliance on the comforts of routine have sustained Wilma—"Miss Wilma," the piano teacher of Lynn York's title—through marriage and motherhood and fifteen years of loneliness after her husband's suicide. But the price of maintaining equanimity has been a failure to communicate fully with the people closest to her. Wilma's relationship with her daughter Sarah, in particular, has suffered for it. During the course of the novel, Wilma's ability to move through life seemingly unaffected is tested by a string of dramatic events: the unexpected attentions of a suitor, the murder of one of her Mayberry-sized town's policemen, and the unannounced appearance on her front porch of Wilma's troubled daughter and granddaughter.

Although its plot revolves in part around a nasty murder and its solution, Lynn York's The Piano Teacher is a sweet, quiet novel. In it, the relationships between Wilma and Sarah and between Sarah and her husband are explored and, while we're watching, subtly altered. The characters—particularly that of Wilma—are well drawn, and life in a small community in which nonconformity is checked by the threat of scandal is nicely evoked. The book gets off to a slow start in its initial chapter, but readers who keep with the book will be rewarded.