The Testing of Luther Albright » (Bargain)

MacKenzie Bezos lives in Seattle, Washington. This is her first novel.

Luther Albright is a devoted father and a designer of dams, a self-controlled man who believes he can engineer happiness for his family by sheltering them from his own emotions.

But when an earthquake shakes his Sacramento home, the world Luther has constructed with such care begins to tilt: his son's behavior becomes increasingly bizarre and threatening, his loving wife seems to grow distant, the house he built with his own hands shows its first signs of decay, and a dam of his design comes under investigation for structural flaws exposed by the tremors. Nightmarish connections begin to whisper at Luther from the most innocent of places as debut novelist MacKenzie Bezos tightens her net of psychological suspense around the reader with bravura skill. This is a harrowing portrait of an ordinary man who finds himself tested and strives not to be found wanting.

The New York Times - Kate Bolick

In MacKenzie Bezos' quietly absorbing first novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, the jumble of pipes and tubing snaking through her protagonist's modest two-story house is his very soul writ large. As an emotionally repressed young man, Luther built it and laid the plumbing with his own hands. Twenty-three years later, he's an emotionally repressed husband and father who communes more readily with a flashlight and a propane torch than with his wife and son. To him, a clogged drain is a welcome reprieve from conversation.