December 15, 2018
Fear, lies, and violence beset an impoverished town.The fictional northern California town of Carverville, "utterly comatose, on the point of death, a ghost town in the making," is the setting for a convoluted mystery by fiction, travel, food, and arts writer Downie (A Taste of Paris: A History of the Parisian Love Affair with Food, 2017, etc.). The story centers on James Paul Adams, now in his 50s, who grew up in Carverville, an outsider by virtue of his educated, city-bred parents and his own intelligence and ambition. College, law school, and a career as a judge kept him away for 4 decades; but when the novel opens, James has returned, bearded and wild-haired, suffering and searching. He is a widower, grieving for his lost wife; he has escaped "certain people" pursuing him; and he is haunted by the memory of Maggie, the young woman he once loved. After traveling aimlessly in a rented RV, he finds himself at the Eden Seaside Resort & Cottages, run by the eccentric Beverley, a busybody who seems to know everyone and everything in town and who protects James from the suspicions of Carverville's sinister policemen, who are eager to run strangers out of town. More than economically depressed, the town is a hotbed of corruption, racism, and xenophobia, lorded over by gun-toting bullies notable for "stupidity, ignorance, and dullness." This is Trump's America, Downie implies, rife with climate-change deniers and white supremacists. Deputized as immigration agents, the "citizen posse of good white boys" is led by a villain who has created "a reign of terror." The plot thickens--becoming positively clotted--after James and Taz, a teenager who works for Beverley, find a cage, washed up on the shore, containing what appear to be human bones. As James plunges into investigating the bizarre discovery, he comes upon increasingly grisly evidence. Downie piles on "life-changing revelations" that, unfortunately, are obvious to the reader long before they are unveiled for James; and the extent of violence makes the novel blur into dystopian science fiction.Too many secrets overwhelm the story.
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February 1, 2019
Recently widowed retired judge James Adams has driven across the U.S. in a rented RV to return to his birthplace in the Pacific Northwest, drawn by the memory of his high-school sweetheart, who ran off mysteriously with her professor while James was away at college. James finds work assisting Beverly, the overly loquacious proprietor of Eden Seaside Resort & Cottages, whose Sherlockian eye for detail and predilection for conspiracy theories fill him with unease. James soon befriends Alexander, nicknamed Taz, a 17-year-old, green-haired tech wiz with whom he uncovers a gruesome crime. The once-thriving logging town of Carverville has become a small police state in this near-future dystopia, following the Downburst, a catastrophe that devastated both the economy and the environment. Surveillance cameras and drones maintain order, feral hogs run wild, and James' childhood classmate is now sheriff and believed to have a sadistic means of disposing of undesirables. The tension ratchets up and the mysteries begin to unravel as Downie expertly captures the powerlessness and courage of those in peril.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)