The Little Friend

The Little Friend was published in 2002, a decade after Donna Tartt's first novel, and it moves a long way from the New England campus of The Secret History to a small Mississippi town in the early 1970s. It opens with a death that has already happened: twelve years earlier, on Mother's Day in 1964, nine-year-old Robin Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in the family's garden.

Tartt gives the aftermath more room than the crime. Robin's mother has retreated into a depression that has lasted more than a decade, his father left, and the household is held together by a black housekeeper, Ida Rhew, whose patience with her employers becomes one of the book's running subjects. Harriet, the younger of Robin's two sisters, has grown up in the shadow of a brother she barely knew.

Harriet's investigation is really a child's attempt to impose a story on a loss nobody will explain, and Tartt lets her carry it into the parts of the town the family does not visit: the Ratliff family, who manufacture and sell drugs, and whose sons become her suspects. The book is long, unhurried and full of Southern weather, and it owes less to detective fiction than to the gothic novels of the American South.