The Monsters of Templeton

Willie Upton returns to Templeton, New York, pregnant and humiliated after an affair with her archaeology professor, just as the body of a gigantic lake creature rises from Lake Glimmerglass. Her mother then reveals that Willie’s biological father is not the man she had always believed him to be and tells her that the answer can be found in their family history. Willie begins tracing generations of Upton ancestors through letters, journals, portraits and local stories while the town’s living residents and its supernatural presences complicate her search.

Templeton is a transformed version of Cooperstown, and the novel borrows its name and some imaginative foundations from James Fenimore Cooper’s fictional geography. Its present-day mystery opens into more than two centuries of settlement, family secrecy, social hierarchy and changing American identities, moving among colonial, revolutionary and nineteenth-century voices. Because the contemporary investigation depends on reconstructed ancestral narratives, ghosts and a legendary lake monster, the book works as a hybrid family saga, historical mystery and historical fantasy rather than a wholly period-set novel.