Littlefield, Massachusetts, named one of the Ten Best Places to Live in America, full of psychologists and college professors, is proud of its fine schools, its girls’ soccer teams, its leafy streets, and charming village center. Yet no sooner has sociologist Dr. Clarice Watkins arrived to study the elements of 'good quality of life' than someone begins poisoning the town’s dogs.
“The Dogs of Littlefield is so absorbing that I kept forgetting to take notes. Berne is a canny writer. Her scenes are elegantly composed, and even throwaway characters jump off the page.
Berne has a gift for navigating the subterranean currents coursing under the skin, and she shares the inner lives of her characters more generously than they — than we — often do with one another.
Berne has created an intriguing portrait of the kind of loneliness that can only exist in a crowd, and given the lie to all those surveys that suggest a place or its community can be summed up by its house prices, crime statistics and performance indicators.
