A Prison Without Bars

Rachel Lyon's Fruit of the Dead

Fruit of the Dead. By Rachel Lyon. New York: Scribner, 2024. 320 pages. $28.00.

Rolo Picazo is a bad guy. He’s obscenely wealthy, and that’s from his role as CEO of Southgate pharmaceuticals, which makes a lot of money with painkillers. He’s arrogant, hedonistic, and now embattled, as the “bastards in Congress” want someone to pay for the opioid crisis. He’s even a man too ready to explain things, wanting everyone to know that he knows that the Greek word for scapegoat is pharmākos. He likes his two children, but when his ex-wife assigns them to him for the end of summer, he’s hardly going to wipe their noses and read them bedtime stories, so he’ll be hiring a babysitter, and he’d like her to be young and pretty.

Cory Anselm is eighteen, and without a plan. Raised in Manhattan by a single mother, Emer, who runs an agricultural NGO, Cory is now supposed to go to college, but didn’t get in anywhere. Needing a summer job, she becomes counselor at her beloved River Rock summer camp, where only she can calm a nervous, runny-nosed child named Spenser. On the last day of camp, playing alone in the barn with some paper flowers, she’s joined by a very large “rippling man”, his face in shadow, with Spenser and a young girl at his sides. The man is ardently attentive to her. Through Spenser he invites her to join them at a nearby diner called Pluto.