Garden Lakes, Jaime Clarke's third novel featuring Charlie Martens, finds Charlie employed as an Arizona newspaper columnist who has built his career on a deception he committed that inadvertently stirred up anti-immigrant sentiment, casting a pall over the state. But Charlie's story is really one of serial deception, a life of prevarications he traces back to a summer fellowship program he attended while a junior at an all-boys prep school. The chosen fellows were tasked with undertaking supervised construction of a house in a half-built development donated to the school by the bankrupt developer. The fellows lived and worked together and were tested when a transient girl wandered into the development after the disappearance of both of the fellowship's chaperones. What happened at Garden Lakes reverberates through everyone's lives, but especially Charlie's, which is forever altered by his actions that summer. As tense and tight and pitch-perfect as Clarke's narrative of the harrowing events at Garden Lakes is, and as fine a meditation it is on Golding's novel, what deepens this book to another level of insight and artfulness is the parallel portrait of Charlie Martens as an adult, years after his fateful role that summer, still tyrannized, paralyzed, tangled in lies, wishing for redemption, maybe fated never to get it. Complicated and feral, Garden Lakes is thrilling, literary, and smart as hell.