The House on Buzzard Bay by Dwyer Murphy
There are books that unfold like puzzles, others that claw at your ribs — and then there’s The House on Buzzards Bay, which reads like a dream you’re not quite sure you’ve woken up from. A noir that hums with unease and foggy edges, Dwyer Murphy’s latest isn’t just a crime novel, it’s a ghost story masquerading as a legal thriller, a meditation on memory, and a lyrical descent into the uncanny.
A Noir Drenched in Fog, Memory, and Ghosts
Jim invites his closest friends from college to spend the summer with him and his family at his vacation home in Buzzards Bay. He inherited this house, but grew up spending summers in town and hopes the summer will rekindle their friendship. But when one of the friends disappears amidst a series of break ins in the town, it casts a strange feeling over the rest of the summer and Jim and his guests start to question reality.
From the first page, Murphy casts a spell. The prose is moody and precise, soaked in salt air and ambiguity. The narrator, a disillusioned attorney drawn back to his eerie coastal hometown, becomes our unreliable guide through a story that may or may not be happening in the way he perceives it. There’s a murder. There’s a house. There’s a town that feels like it exists half in shadow, and all of it blurs the line between reality and reverie.
The narrative unfolds in waves, never quite giving you firm ground. Time folds in on itself. Characters appear with the weight of past lives. Conversations feel like echoes. Everything is quiet and eerie and laced with something just outside the realm of logic. It’s not quite supernatural, but it’s also not not. There’s an evident thread of dream logic sewn into the seams of every scene, leaving the reader suspended in a kind of literary limbo.
When Reality Frays and Stories Haunt
If you’re looking for tidy resolutions or sharp genre beats, this isn’t your book. But if you like your mysteries strange, poetic, thick with fog, and slow burns, The House on Buzzards Bay is a hypnotic ride. Murphy doesn’t just tell a story — he conjures a mood. And long after the final page, you’re left wondering: Did I read that, or did I dream it?
About Dwyer Murphy:
Dwyer Murphy is the author of An Honest Living and The Stolen Coast, both of which were New York Times Editors’ Choice selections. He is the editor in chief of Literary Hub‘s CrimeReads vertical, the world’s most popular destination for thriller readers, and was previously an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction.
