A Death in Belmont
W.W. Norton & Harper Collins, April 2006
In the spring of 1963, the quiet suburb of Belmont, Massachusetts was rocked by a shocking sex murder that exactly fits the pattern of the Boston Strangler. Sensing a break in the case that has paralyzed the city of Boston , the police tracked down a black man, Roy Smith, who cleaned the victim’s house that day and left a receipt with his name on the kitchen counter. Smith is hastily convicted of the Belmont murder, but the terror of the Strangler continues.
On the day of the murder, Albert DeSalvo — the man who would eventually confess in lurid detail to the Strangler’s crimes — was also in Belmont, working as a carpenter at the Jungers’ home. Could it be that he was responsible for the Goldberg murder? Could it be that he then returned to work — composed enough to talk with a shaken Mrs. Junger about what a terrible thing had happened down the block that afternoon? The questions would remain.
In A DEATH IN BELMONT, Junger does again what he does best: gives us a spare, powerful narrative that probes behind a terrifying reality, in search a truth that has long since gone to the grave. And once again, he shows us a piece of America in a way we’ve never quite seen it before.
“Junger’s taut narrative makes dizzying hairpin turns As Junger showed in his bestselling THE PERFECT STORM, he’s a hell of a storyteller, and here he intertwines underlying moral quandaries with the tales of [DeSalvo and Smith]. This perplexing story gains an extra degree of creepiness from Junger’s personal connection to it.”
– Publishers Weekly (starred)
“In DeSalvo’s dark world, Junger’s clear, beautifully reasonable writing is the literary equivalent of night-vision goggles. In THE PERFECT STORM Junger had a great story to work with; in A Death in Belmont there is no central thread. He’s navigating a maze of shadows, and you can see all the more clearly what an enormously skillful prose artist he is.”
-Lev Grossman, Time Magazine