LIAR'S CREEK, Matt Goldman's Clay Hawkins mystery series book one

LIAR'S CREEK (Clay Hawkins #1)
MATT GOLDMAN
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From New York Times bestselling author and Emmy Award-winner Matt Goldman comes Liar's Creek, which asks how far we'll go to protect the people we love.

The small town of Riverwood, Minnesota is true to its name, brimming with beautiful scenes of nature. Its rural landscape is threaded with scenic trout streams, which carve their way through limestone bluffs. But beneath its picturesque facade, danger runs rampant.

Clay Hawkins isn’t a stranger to the secrets of his hometown. After twenty years away, Clay has recently returned home from abroad with his twelve-year-old son Braedon, and his relationship with his father Judd, the recently replaced sheriff, is as strained as ever.

Trouble immediately brews for Clay when his beloved uncle, Teddy, disappears. Together, the three generations of Hawkinses must overturn every stone in Riverwood and confront deep familial wounds to find the one person who brings them together. As danger looms, Clay worries that it might be too late to save Teddy—and that the rest of the family might be next.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author Goldman clearly invested a lot of mental energy in Clay Hawkins' life trajectory. It's all here: dead mother, grouchy prickly father, adolescent son with all that implies and entails, escapr from then return to Home after a fun, fascinating adulthood elsewhere...it's all here. Coming home has its rewards, these aren't skimped, and its risks. Uncle Teddy, who vanishes without explanation, is going to be found, by Clay, and damned if his family's ugly secrets they do NOT want splashed around will stop Clay from doing it.

Perch that determination on top of his...estranged, unliked...father making a friend of Clay's son, and the differing ways to be a father between the generations add a load of tension between them, among all three of them. The women in the story are all strong, competent people, with their own careers and concerns. They're not little ladies, nor are they ball-busting viragos, they're presented as flawed and imperfect like the stiff-necked men they choose to hang around with.

The mystery's resolved. Copious trout-fishing is done. Football/soccer is discussed. The manly men (and one about to start being a man) all do man-stuff like pointedly not talk, like ignore feelings (their own of course, but each others' too), not talk, lust after women, and not talk. It takes extreme measures to goad them into speech not about sports. When they do talk, shit gets done and in a hurry.

I'm afraid I was not surprised by the big reveal. I really seldom am, and this was not one of those times. I don't fault Author Goldman for that. I fault him a little for apparently losing track of some red-herrings that will stink up the furniture in future installments of the series. There will be future installments because no publisher works this hard to drop a promising premise. I hope the team will make some serious effort to answer young Braedon's quite reasonable questions about his past that he's too young to remember on his own.

A promising debut series that needs a bit of finesse applied as it matures.