Elizabeth Strout Gets the Gang Back Together for a Murder Mystery

In “Tell Me Everything,” Bob Burgess deepens his emotional connection with Lucy Barton as he defends a local man accused of killing his mother.

By Elizabeth Schaitkin

TELL ME EVERYTHING, by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout’s readers have spent nearly three decades watching her characters’ lives intersect across her body of work. Her 10th book, the tender “Tell Me Everything,” has the feel of a long-awaited reunion: Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton, the Burgess siblings, William and Margaret and Helen and Pam — the gang’s all here.

“Tell Me Everything” finds Lucy, a writer who has recently relocated from New York City to Crosby, Maine, in a will-they-or-won’t-they plot with Bob Burgess, a mostly retired lawyer who has lived in Crosby for 15 years with his wife, Margaret. On riverside strolls together (which they began taking in Strout’s previous novel, “Lucy by the Sea”), Lucy and Bob develop an emotional intimacy that promises — or threatens — to become more. Meanwhile, Olive, now 90 and blunt as ever, summons Lucy to her retirement community to tell her a story about Olive’s mother, thinking that “if her story could be told to a writer, maybe it could be used in a book one day.”

Lucy ends up visiting Olive regularly so that the two women can trade stories about the “unrecorded lives” of people they’ve known. At the same time, Bob agrees to take on the defense of Matt Beach, a local man suspected of murdering his octogenarian mother. Read the full review at the New York Times.