The Heirs: A Novel

"The question that Susan Rieger explores in The Heirs is a fascinating one: Does death root us in memory as the people we were while breathing, or should consequent data, gathered after the fact, be used to ret-con the recollections of the survivors? Or, put more simply, is a good man forever a good man even after death shakes loose secrets he kept hidden in life? Though never explicitly answered – or answered in different ways by different characters – the primary joy in The Heirs is in chewing over Rieger’s gorgeous prose. The entire book reads in a clipped, clean, lockjawed voice, as if the words themselves had all gone to Vassar and spent their summers boating in the Hamptons."