{"id":2020,"date":"2022-08-25T19:23:49","date_gmt":"2022-08-25T19:23:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2020"},"modified":"2023-03-11T18:33:34","modified_gmt":"2023-03-11T18:33:34","slug":"a-flaw-in-the-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2020","title":{"rendered":"A Flaw in the Design"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Oates, Nathan. A Flaw in the Design. March, 2023. 304p. Random.<br \/>\nGil and his wife are living their dream. He\u2019s a writing professor at a small Vermont college, she\u2019s an artist, their two daughters are as smart as they are well-behaved. Sure, money is tight, but life is rich. Until his sister and her husband die under distinctly odd circumstances and their only child, 17-year-old Matthew, comes to live with them. To say there\u2019s history here is an understatement. Gil\u2019s sister married way up, well into the realm of the one percenters. While the wealth disparity made for awkwardness, it\u2019s Matthew\u2019s crazy, violent behavior that sets everyone on edge. The last time the two families got together, seven years ago at the sister\u2019s house in Montauk, Matthew tried to drown Gil\u2019s youngest daughter. But Matthew 2.0 is completely different. He charms the daughters, ingratiates himself with Gil\u2019s wife, and even signs up for Gil\u2019s fiction-writing class. But while most of the world is taken in by this brilliant and handsome young man, Gil remains a suspicious outlier. Slowly Matthew begins to undermine Gil, submitting for class stories that fantasize about the death of Gil\u2019s daughters and explain how Matthew\u2019s own parents were killed. Eventually Gil is alone in believing that Matthew is a psychopath, creating a growing estrangement from his own family, who are convinced he\u2019s fallen off the deep end. <strong>Yes, this is a thriller, but a deeply thoughtful one that skillfully plays at what is true, what is imagined, and how genius can be used in the evilest of ways.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oates, Nathan. A Flaw in the Design. March, 2023. 304p. Random. Gil and his wife are living their dream. He\u2019s a writing professor at a small Vermont college, she\u2019s an&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2019,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[57,59,52,51],"class_list":["post-2020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-domestic","tag-literary","tag-psychological","tag-thrillers"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Flaw-in-the-Design-400x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Flaw-in-the-Design-400x600.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Brian Kenney","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}