April 10, 2017
Officer Henry Farrell, the affable lone lawman of rural Wild Thyme Township, Pa., has a flair for stirring up trouble, as shown in Edgar-winner Bouman’s atmospheric sequel to 2014’s Dry Bones in the Valley. When waiflike heroin addict Penny Pellings disappears near Maiden’s Grove Lake, Henry’s gut tells him that the most obvious suspect—Penny’s alcoholic partner Kevin O’Keeffe—didn’t abduct her. Soon after drug dealer Charles Michael Heffernan’s corpse surfaces in the Susquehanna River, undercover sleuthing in nearby Binghamton, N.Y., nearly lands Henry behind bars himself, and a car crash springs Heffernan’s kidnapped companion, Vicki Jelinski, from the vehicle’s trunk. As Henry continues to push for information from a plethora of local dirtbags at increasing personal risk, life continues to unspool for the young widower in this scenic but economically depressed patch: playing his fiddle with friends, hunting, moonlighting construction, occasionally hooking up. With time, too, answers gradually emerge. But they prove less compelling than the novel’s poetic, pitch-perfect sense of place. Agent: Neil Olson, Donadio & Olson.