The Exact Nature of our Wrongs by Janet Peery

A family story is never straight forward. This one has more than its fair share of difficult characters. From an AIDS affected younger son, to those who have been indicted for drunk driving, for siblings to whom popping drugs - of any kind is just a day to day "harmless" occupation, Hattie and Abel find themselves perplexed at what they have produced!

Hattie is a woman who is willing to believe the best in everyone and this particularly applies to her family. While everyone knows that Billy is robbing her blind, she pretends that this does not happen but that he is just taken advantage of by all and sundry (not the other way around). She tries to excuse shortfalls in all her children and blindly follows her husband's orders, despite hidden resentments surfacing on and off. These resentments at his high handedness are pushed deep within her mind and she conveniently forgets them until the next time.

Abel on the other hand is aging, with an onset of dementia (?) but is unwilling to accede to any what he sees as weakness on his part to give control of any part of his life to his family. He wants to be the autocrat till the end and greatly succeeds in doing this, despite resentment from all.

This is the background to the story and naturally its ups and downs makes for a good story. Children in their middle age squabbling is ugly, squabbling over stuff which they hope to inherit is even worse but these are facts of life - evident in life around us and this author has descriptively detailed everything out - the good, the bad and the ugly.

Very well told story sent to me by Netgalley for an unbiased review, courtesy of St. Martin's Press