The Avalanche: A Mystery Story
1919
The title promises something unstoppable, and in Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton's 1919 novel, that avalanche is the past crashing into a carefully constructed present. Price Ruyler is a man who believes in the solidity of things: his business, his social position, his marriage. But his wife Hélène has grown distant since their wedding, and her mother Madame Delano carries a past that neither woman will speak of. When Ruyler begins to dig into the shadows behind his wife's changed demeanor, he finds not the comfortable scandal he might have expected, but something far more insidious. The novel builds with the slow dread of early psychological suspense, each revelation peeling back another layer of respectability to reveal the rot beneath. Set among San Francisco's elite in the years after the Great War, Atherton crafts a story about the violence that lives inside polite society and the terrible cost of keeping family secrets.
