Excerpt from Long Black Veil by Jennifer Finney Boylan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

They were six in all, plus Krystal and the boy. Quentin and Casey and Tripper had known each other since high school, out at Devon Boys' Latin on the Main Line. Later, the three of them went to Wes­leyan, which is where they'd met Rachel and Wailer. They'd only graduated three months before, June first. Plans for the future were sketchy.

The day was hot and sticky. Their clothes stuck to their bodies.

On the street ahead, Rachel saw Quentin talking to Herr Krys­tal, his former teacher, and now his friend. The two of them had been yammering away in German all morning. It had kind of wrecked their visit to the Cezannes, in fact. All Rachel had wanted was to look upon The Large Bathers with Quentin, to have him see what she saw. But Quentin had hardly paid The Large Bathers any mind at all. Instead he just yakked away with Krystal in a language that sucked the beauty directly from the air. It was worse than the Black Speech in Tolkien. Ash. na'{_g gimbatu!, suggested Hitler.

Benny, Maisie's little brother, tightened his grip on her hand. The ten-year-old had a buzz cut and enormous glasses that were always on the verge of falling off of his face.

"I'm afraid of the garble," he said.

"Well, get used to it, Benny," said Tripper. There was a gold anchor embroidered on the breast pocket of his blue sport coat. "That's what the world is! Garble and gibberish."

The boy looked at him fearfully. He and Maisie had grown up in a ruined Main Line mansion, a place called the Bagatelle, out in Vil­ lanova. After the exploits of their father, "Lucky" Lenfest, it was the only asset the family had left, a haunted house with a listing Victorian tower, leaking ceilings, an attic full of crap. The heart of the mansion was an elaborate spiral staircase, carved from cherry, with a pipe organ in its center. Maisie was the only one of them who hadn't been at Wes­ leyan. She'd gone to Conestoga High, out in Berwyn, and dated Trip­ per- a scandal, given Tripper's natural predilection for debutantes.

She'd wound up at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, studying organ and harpsichord.

At the wedding the night before, Wailer had come down the cherry staircase of the Bagatelle in her bridal gown as Maisie played "A Whiter Shade of Pale" on the organ. Casey stood at the bottom of the steps, best man Quentin at his side, watching the bride descend. As she drew near him, tears of joy had spilled over Casey's eyelashes and rolled down his cheeks. Wailer's parents had not come to the wedding, being dead.

A half a block ahead of them, Quentin and Herr Krystal started singing. It was the Marlene Dietrich song from The Blue Angel. Quen­tin had gotten Rachel to watch The Blue Angel with him one night, in the same way that she had perhaps tried to get him to look at The Large Bathers. The film had seemed to demonstrate some verity of the world , in Quentin's eyes. But all that Rachel could see was a bunch of proto­ Nazis, intent on breaking one another's hearts.

"Man," said Casey. "It's just like old times, the two of them, makin' sauerkraut. It's like we're in the Time Tunnell"

"Jonny hand meyer pocketknife, will you?"

"What?" said Casey. He reached into his pocket, but his knife was gone. "Wait, no! It's gone!"

Benny held up the jackknife. It bore the initials]. C. "I played a trick on you," he said.

"Benny," said Maisie. "What did we say about the stealing?" Benny wasn't moved. Casey took the knife and handed it to his bride.

"You're a criminal, little dude."

Benny pushed his glasses up his nose and smiled, satisfied.

Krystal and Quentin laughed at something in the Black Speech. Herr Krystal's hand was placed gently on Quentin's back. "Wunderbar.l Wunderbar.l" Krystal shouted.

"Bloody hell," muttered Wailer.

Since graduation three months earlier, Quentin had been living in his high school bedroom. He'd majored in modern foreign languages at Wesleyan, and was supposedly immersed in a project translating Walt Whitman into German. It didn't sound like he'd gotten very far though. He was going to call it Die Whitman Anthologie, which, as Tripper liked to point out, translated, sadly, as The Whitman Sampler. Rachel worried about Quentin, who'd seemed to have the greatest promise of their group, but since graduation the young man's boat had appeared to become hopelessly lodged upon the rocks.

Excerpted from Long Black Veil by Jennifer Finney Boylan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.