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DRY BONES IN THE VALLEY
by Tom Bouman
W.W. Norton & Co,, July 2014
281 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0393243028


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Henry Farrell feels older than he is. He was hoping that being the head policeman in Wild Thyme, Pennsylvania would mean lots of hunting and fishing, not much policing. No such luck. The oil companies have moved to town, bringing money for oil leases, and money brings crime. Meth labs are hidden out in the woods, domestic violence becomes more of a problem, drunk driving is almost commonplace. Nothing Henry can't handle, really, but he'd just as soon not. He is particularly unhappy to see the oil rigs running; his wife died out West after the fracking began, died from some disease nobody recognized. After that, Henry came back home to rural Pennsylvania to pour himself into a bottle. Lucky for Henry, he had friends and they helped him find his way back out, and into this job.

A young man is found on an old family farm - old in three senses of the word. The family has been around since God was in short pants; the farm is almost as old as the family, and Aub (the current owner) is almost senile. The young man is buried in a very shallow grace, with the identification markers gone - hands, face, teeth, and so forth. The common wisdom is that Daniel Stiobhard is the likely killer; Daniel insists that he is not and steers Henry to yet another body, this one very, very old. Again, identification will be difficult, not because the hands, etc. are gone, but the DNA will be difficult to match, considering the age of the corpse and the method of preservation.

Bouman is a very good writer. The language and turn of phrase are lovely, sometimes humorous, always lyrical. His description of the land, which he obviously loves, transports the reader to a new place, a place that really exists. The characters are just as honest and true, although they come from a hard-scrabble existence that most readers may never have seen, much less experienced. As a mystery writer, on the other hand, he has to work on his game. Henry doesn't get what he needs to solve the first case until at least three quarters of the way to the end; therefore the reader doesn't get it until then, either. The clues for the second murder are even fewer and held onto longer, again denying the reader a fair shot at solving the crime at all, much less before Henry. This may not matter to some readers. The writing is wonderful enough to keep those readers happily turning pages.

§ P.J. Coldren lives in northern lower Michigan where she reads and reviews widely across the mystery genre when she isn't working in her local hospital pharmacy.

Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, August 2014

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