SOURCE: Armstrong, Isobel. “In Death Estranged.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4692 (5 March 1993): 21.

In the following review of Before and After, Armstrong examines the degrees of alienation the main characters feel toward each other and toward their small-town community.

Before and After is a crime novel seen from back to front. When a teenage girl is found brutally battered to death in a small New Hampshire town, the mystery begins rather than ends with the discovery of the killer. And the drama begins and continues with the murderer's family, when the unsuspecting parents learn that their son is wanted for the murder. Not who did it, but how and why, becomes the question.

Rosellen Brown, an American poet and novelist, has written a profound novel about a family which has to find out about itself. Witnesses, clues, evidence, the grand finale in the courtroom, these are at the periphery of...