Zibby
Published December 2, 2025
Reviewed by Mary-Jane Oltarzewski
The Gallagher Place begins with a solid premise: In 2018, over Thanksgiving weekend, three affluent Manhattanites – adult siblings Nate, Marlowe, and Henry Fisher – are visiting their family’s country home in upstate New York when they discover a murdered man on the property. The subsequent investigation rocks the rural community, and raises questions about the unsolved disappearance of a local girl, twenty years earlier. Sixteen-year-old Nora Miller and middle child Marlowe were teenage besties who shared a room in the Fisher house just about every weekend; since she vanished, the town has never stopped gossiping, and the Fisher family, especially Marlowe, has never been the same.
The trouble is, the impact of Nora’s disappearance has rendered Marlowe a numb, not terribly interesting protagonist. Apparently she was so attached to her bff that she never learned how to develop other relationships, so she drinks, and reminisces, and ruminates, leaving the reader to wonder whether her parents and brothers don’t take her seriously because she’s such a dreary piece of work, or if she has become that way because they don’t take her seriously. She loves her dismissive family, and she loves the Gray House, as it is called, but her alcoholism and stunted social development have rendered her POV not just unreliable, but really, really slow.
Here and there, there are vague references to family secrets, not only among the Fishers and their loyal manservant, Enzo, but also about and among the previous owners of the neighboring property. Unfortunately, it takes more than half the novel to set these secrets up as anything interesting or relevant. The land across the road from the Gray House was formerly a dairy farm, worked by three bachelor brothers named Gallagher who died in rapid succession, leaving the property to a distant cousin, who sold it to family patriarch Frank Fisher. Sometime after Nora’s disappearance, but before the discovery of the murdered man, Frank razed the farmhouse and all its outbuildings, doubling the official size of the family estate, although Marlowe’s recollections make it clear that she, her brothers, and Nora seemed to have free run of the place, long before the Gallaghers’ demise. There are whiffs of resentment and class conflict between the wealthy city dwellers and the working class locals like the Gallaghers, the Millers, and the other struggling farm families, even though Glory Fisher, mother of the siblings, started out life as a farm girl from a repressed, conservative family before marrying Frank and becoming the strong, stern, humorless matriarch of the estate.
Glory has the potential to be a truly intriguing character, but poor Marlowe seems to be too depressed to sketch her, or for that matter her husband or sons, as anything more than a few thinly realized signposts: the stern wife, the wealthy white businessman, the bossy older brother, the tagalong younger brother. Both brothers are married with families, but it seems that the only purpose of the wives and children is to make Marlowe look even more lonely and alienated. In the early scenes, Doar drops in a bit of underdeveloped foreshadowing, largely in the form of petty crimes and injured animals, but these all seem to exist in order to make Marlowe look and feel like an outsider. Unfortunately, it takes a couple of hundred pages to clarify what, exactly, she is on the outside of.
A strong plot can make up for unremarkable characters, and memorable characters can turn a weak story into a compelling read, but sadly, The Gallagher Place has neither. In the last fifty or sixty pages, a couple of detectives from Poughkeepsie – another missed opportunity for character development – do manage to solve both mysteries, but at that point, the characters are all so thinly written and/or unlikeable, that it’s hard not to feel disappointed.