"My wife of more than forty-five years shot herself yesterday afternoon. At least that is what the police assume, and I am playing the part of grieving widower with enthusiasm and success...It was I who killed her." Thus begins The Drowning People, the media-hyped first novel by 20-year-old Oxford undergraduate Richard Mason. Your typical murder mystery it is not, for we are given the identity of the killer--the "who?"--immediately. The puzzle to be solved in this introspective novel is "why?"--why did 70-year-old James Farrell murder his wife Sarah? The answer, as it develops from his own confession, delves nearly 50 years into the past and roams from Prague to London, from France to a remote castle in Cornwall. At its core is an intoxicating love affair set amidst the stifling world of English aristocracy: James at 22, a talented musician and hopeless romantic and Ella Harewood, his wife"s cousin, an American heiress to an English title, trapped by her heritage and destiny. A beautifully written exploration of self-absorbed first love and its tragic consequences, Richard Mason"s The Drowning People soars beyond the highest of expectations placed upon it. --Shannon Bingham