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Eric Shaw is picking up the pieces of his life. He is back in the mid-West after trying to make the grade as a cinematographer in LA and failing. His marriage is on the skids. He's reduced to, among other things, doing post-mortem memorials for the families of the dead. One of these leads to his current job. Campbell Bradford is ninety-five and not in good health. He came from the French Lick/West Baden area as a child, left home, and made a fortune in Chicago. His daughter-in-law wants some kind of combination of a video history of his life and the place he came from. She's prepared to pay a lot of money for it. Eric takes the job. Alyssa Bradford hands Eric a small glass bottle of mineral water from French Lick. The bottom of the bottle has an image of a smiling devil; the bottle is labeled Pluto Water, America's Physic. The bottle feels cold, colder than one might expect. Eric goes to French Lick/West Baden and starts asking questions. He makes a connection with a graduate student working on the area's history; they decide their interests overlap and they work together. The bottle gets colder. Eric decides to taste the water. Wrong thing to do. Eric's life, and the story, takes a decidedly different and interesting turn from that point on. Koryta has written a story that is difficult to put down. Ordinary, everyday details accumulate and the weight of those details grows the story, takes it places that are scary and believable. None of the characters is really remarkable or unrealistic; the same cannot be said of the situations in which they find themselves. Still, the story hangs together. There will be comparisons to Stephen King's THE SHINING, and rightly so. Koryta has taken another giant step as a writer with this book; read it and see for yourself. § 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, May 2010
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