Mavis / Brenda K. Marshall.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

For sixty years Mavis Schmidt Holmstead has smoothed every wrinkle, threaded every needle, and cooled every fever in a family of six sisters who grew up on a North Dakota farm. More than their patient, hardworking mother or their hard-drinking, unpredictable father, it was Mavis, the eldest, who was always the parent. Mavis checked their homework, set their hair for dates, and glowed with pride as their babies were born or their books were published. She had the gravitational pull to propel her sisters into adulthood, though she could not have imagined how divergent their lives would turn out to be. Today Maxine, the second oldest, is a scholar living in Chicago. Judy, vain and restless, goes from one marriage to the next seeking adulation and luxury. Isabelle has found love but has never introduced the woman who has been her longtime lover to her family. Only Janice and Irene stayed in their hometown near Mavis. But Janice's life is drudgery made worse by her brutish husband Norton. And Irene is dead, killed in the fiery crash of a car driven by her drunken husband Jack Carlson. The whole family blames Jack for Irene's death, and now Jack, too, has been killed, shot in the face at close range with his own rifle. The confessed murderer is Mavis--widow, mother, grandmother, and head of the family. The sisters gather around Mavis, not only to support her, but to discover the truth. No one believes Mavis capable of murder. She must be lying, but why? As old rivalries and outgrown roles rend the fragile fabric of family that Mavis has worked so hard to preserve, each sister will have to face responsibility for her own life--although that always seemed to be Mavis's job. The buried secrets and dangerous emotions soon to be revealed will ring more true than Mavis's confession of murder, and the truth will be something that none of them, no matter how resistant, will be able to ignore. In her wonderful debut novel, Brenda Marshall creates remarkable characters in Mavis and her family, women and men we recognize in an instant, and feel weve known all our lives. Told in graceful prose, in a style both darkly funny and hypnotic, Mavis heralds the arrival of a unique and talented voice in American fiction.