Pegasus Books
December 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-070-6
Hardcover, 240 pp., $25.00
The year is 1965 – a turbulent year across the cities of the US. There is an unpopular war going on in a place called Vietnam, and in the small Iowa town of Black River Falls, Sam McCain has helped organize an anti-war rally. A small affair, drawing only about 30 people, it is nonetheless polarizing, and when the wealthy and influential Lou Bennett, father of a casualty of that war and a war hero in his own right, takes the microphone to assert his rage against the protesters, things take an even more dramatic turn. For later that night, on the grounds of his estate, Bennett is stabbed to death.
McCain, a local attorney now in his late twenties, has a p.i. license and is an investigator for four-times-married Judge Esme Anne Whitney. Sam lovingly refers to her as the Ice Maiden, and says of her “for a striking woman of noble bones, she had the ability to suddenly turn into Joseph Stalin when she threatened you.” She is a well-respected member of the judiciary in Black River Falls, a town where everyone knows everyone else, and has known them all their lives. Sam becomes involved in the investigation into Bennett’s death in both capacities, as his former girlfriend implores him to absolve the man arrested for the crime – a celebrity of sorts who was the main attraction at the rally, and who is not coincidentally now her lover.
The residents of Black River Falls are just as quirky and charming as one might expect. Sam’s good friend, Kenny Thibodeau, for example, who knows more about everyone in town then almost anyone else, and is described as “our town’s soft-core pornographer and writer of tall tales for men’s magazines,” and whose high-school heroes were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Then there is the local minister who rails against “commies” in the community on his radio show, considers Elvis Presley the anti-Christ, and holds ceremonies where books and records by the Beatles and Rolling Stones, among others, are to be burned [and which go hilariously awry]. On a darker note, the mystery broadens when a fire two years prior, which killed a beautiful young woman and was deemed accidental, appears to have been less than accidental.
The writing is wonderful, e.g., “The temperature was July, but the slant and quality of sunlight was autumn, the golden color thinner and not as burnished. I used to hike in the woods, and I became aware of how different the sunlight is season to season. I once tried explaining this on a first date. Can you guess why there wasn’t a second date?” The political issues are presented clearly, but the writing is not preachy, and the present-day relevance is inescapable. It had been a while since I read a Sam McCain book, and I fervently hope it will not be too long before there is another.
Highly recommended.
