Farrar Straus Giroux“The Ninth Hour” by Alice McDermott By Lily King, Special to The Washington Post “The Ninth Hour,” Alice McDermott’s superb and masterful new novel, begins with a suicide and culminates in murder. The book’s real thrills, though, are in the feats of its storytelling. McDermott lays out all the pieces at the beginning: In the early years of the 20th century, a 32-year-old man asphyxiates himself in a railroad flat, and two nuns come to the aid of his pregnant widow. Her baby, Sally, will in time marry a man named Patrick, and Sally and Patrick’s children narrate this novel to extraordinary effect.

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