WILDWOOD, second in the Northwoods police-procedural series

WILDWOOD (Northwoods #2)
AMY PEASE
Atria/Emily Bestler Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the acclaimed author of the “riveting debut” (People) Northwoods, a mother-son law enforcement team confront buried secrets in their small town as they work to expose a conspiracy that goes far beyond the tight-knit community.

Deputy Sheriff Eli North has spent the last year getting his life back together. He hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol, he’s working through his PTSD from his military deployment, and he’s repairing his most important relationships. When an undercover informant disappears and all signs point to murder, Eli must expose the dark underbelly of his idyllic Wisconsin small town while safeguarding his newfound stability.

Then, with the unexpected arrival of FBI Agent Alyssa Mason, Eli and his mother, the sheriff, are pulled deeper into a violent criminal network built on the backs of the lost and forgotten.

As the case deepens, loyalties fracture and the line between justice and survival begins to blur. In a town where everyone has something to hide, exposing the truth may cost them everything.

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

My Review: Marge and Eli are back! (Follow the link at the top to find out who they are.) They're making rural northern Wisconsin as safe from wrongdoing as they're able to. It's been simple up to now.

That's a joke. The truth is nothing in law enforcement is simple, nor has it ever been. It's always a balancing act, it's an exercise in how deep the shadows are that you can leave alone and still accomplish the goal of reinforcing Ma'at's web of right action and good behavior. Ancient Egypt's goddess of the social fabric ought to replace the yucky moralizing minatory system in place now...though of course that's always how humans will develop any system of control given enough time.

Back to Author Pease: Alyssa and Marge are developed in ways I would not have predicted they would be. In common with the rest of the series, Author Pease uses this story to give her characters personhood, real dimensionality; even contradictory and inconsistent pasts and goals that change. It makes them all feel like people I would be pleased to meet in real life. They are believably still dealing with the same kind of crisis as in Northwoods because these issues were not, could not be, resolved to an end point in one case (no matter how complex and wide-ranging it turned out to be).

That's really the secret of a solid, lasting series mystery. The scoobygroup needs to feel like a posse you'd want to join by reading about them. Their interactions and interdependence are the source of a social web that will either trap you or make you desperate to escape. I'm in the trapped camp.

Social disintegration, personal reconstruction, Life's endless stream of entropy...all in this very well-crafted and solidly written story of a family doing its dead-level best to battle for Right, Good, and Justice for All. Well worth your time and treasure, like the first one was.

NORTHWOODS, deeper than I expected by the end of the read

NORTHWOODS
AMY PEASE
Atria/Emily Bestler Books
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The dark underbelly of an idyllic Midwestern resort town is revealed in the aftermath of a murder with ties to America’s opioid epidemic in this unputdownable and thrilling debut that is perfect for fans of James Lee Burke, William Kent Krueger, and Mindy Mejia.

Eli North is not okay.

His drinking is getting worse by the day, his emotional wounds after a deployment to Afghanistan are as raw as ever, his marriage and career are over, and the only job he can hold down is with the local sheriff’s department. And that’s only because the sheriff is his mother—and she’s overwhelmed with small town Shaky Lake’s dwindling budget and the fallout from the opioid epidemic. The Northwoods of Wisconsin may be a vacationer’s paradise, but amidst the fishing trips and campfires and Paul Bunyan festivals, something sinister is taking shape.

When the body of a teenage boy is found in the lake, it sets in motion an investigation that leads Eli to a wealthy enclave with a violent past, a pharmaceutical salesman, and a missing teenage girl. Soon, Eli and his mother, along with a young FBI agent, are on the hunt for more than just a killer.

If Eli solves the case, could he finally get the shot at redemption he so desperately needs? Or will answers to this dark case elude him and continue to bring destruction to the Northwoods?

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

My Review: The steady erosion of the workforce in rural areas is pushing a major crisis in substance abuse to epidemic proportions. This is what underpins the story that debut mystery writer Amy Pease chooses to tell us.

Eli, our main character, is self-medicating with alcohol (the legal drug) his PTSD, his marriage ending, and the loss of his career in the US Fish and Wildlife job he's done since leaving Afghanistan. His mother Marge does what any good parent would do, scrapes him up and gives him a purpose: As sheriff in a drastically underfunded department, she hires him to be a deputy. No one can say it's only nepotism, since he was a soldier, then a game warden, and so what if he's her son? Should she overlook his attendance problems and his increasingly frequent panic attacks from his entirely self-"managed" PTSD? In reality, no. In the book, she does, and it goes pretty much unexamined. As does a lot of the painfully obvious skulduggery rampant in the town...in the name of "going along to get along."

No good deed goes unpunished.

Eli comes across a murder that will make the entire town take stock of what they all know but won't discuss. In this way it resembles "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" in its exposé of complicity by silence. The silences run deep. The town's got many dirty little secrets, and Eli has the end of the thread that unravels the curtain hiding them in the murder of a teenaged boy. That it involves a local drug rehab center...for rich people...is the meat of the sandwich. There is a LOT of drug use in Shaky Lake, Wisconsin, and no one from the town gets help at that rehab...nicely done, Author Pease. There's a lot to unpick in the way this story attacks many facets of the status quo. This is, in fact, the reason I gave it four stars. If I was going solely on its literary merits, maybe three would be more like it. The pacing is slow, the way the author uses descriptions is odd...though it was the way I stumbled upon my fourth star...and the completely unprofessional behavior of Sheriff Marge towards her deputy Eli wouldn't pass the most casual law-enforcement scrutiny.

The action in the book, as in direct conflict, takes place in the last quarter or so; until then, one's got to be kept reading by the investment made in the characters. The frequency of Eli's panic attacks as he responds to the initial call for a disturbance of peace and thus discovers the dead boy became a cause of problems for me. I got jittery every time I was forewarned of another social situation that would trigger Eli. It's a state of negative arousal, so I wasn't at all sure I wanted to keep reading. His lack of proper help, at apparently any turn in his post-service life, turned out to be my dark little clue of what the author was doing. The lights came on for me when I realized the only places she was using descriptive words that were more than merely functional was when Eli was in the woods, or among the wealthy people in his resort-ridden town. The safest and most unsafe places in Eli's world were heightened, thus counterpointed.

Clever. Subtle. Make the contrast unmissable, once you've seen it. The plot's main driver becomes less the murder of that poor kid, and more the hideous disfiguring sense of entitlement that Eli smacks into as he shakily grasps the threads of motive behind the murder. After the dead kid's girlfriend disappears and the FBI gets involved...why that would occur remains hazy in my mind...even then, Eli and Marge are just kept in their place. That the resolution of the case comes at the cost of Eli's illusions about his world, and his mother, is down to the outsiders. Yet nothing is going to change, it feels like to me; the perpetrators are not let off scot-free but there's no sign of some wider awakening....

Honestly, I was in two minds about how to rate and focus on the review until I thought back on the larger exposé aspects of the story as told. Eli is a suffering everyman, a person used and discarded by the very world he's served and is still serving as being broken therefore useless. What I felt the author was doing in making Eli's panic attacks so frequent yet so pointedly timed, was a kind of human kintsugi. Much like the narrative device in A Man and a Woman, it's something that must be allowed to pervade one's sense of the story. To bring it into sharp relief would've made the author's deeper purpose, the one I perceived anyway, too on-the-nose. No exaggeration intended, it truly changed my perfectly okay read of a first mystery, possibly a series-starter, into a very pleasant read of a solidly crafted, well-aimed novel.

Good one, Author Pease.

THE GOOD DIVIDE by Kali VanBaale...you CAN choose your family...but what then?

THE GOOD DIVIDE
KALI VanBAALE
MG Press
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the lush countryside of Wisconsin, Jean Krenshaw is the ideal 1960's dairy farm wife. She cooks, sews, raises children, and plans an annual July 4th party for friends and neighbors. But when her brother-in-law Tommy, who lives next door, marries leery newcomer Liz, Jean is forced to confront a ten-year-old family secret involving the unresolved death of a young woman.

With stark and swift prose, VanBaale's second novel, The Good Divide, explores one woman's tortured inner world, and the painful choices that have divided her life, both past and present, forever.

My Review: I asked Midwestern Gothic Press for a review copy of this novel, and they obliged me with a .mobi file which I read with the kind of focus others give sacred texts.

I was heartbroken at least a half dozen times, furious almost all the time, and ended the read with a gusty sigh for the many, many ways people hurt themselves and each other in the service of love. The book's main point...that it is the Marthas of the world that suffer for their love, silently and passionately...is one I've got a very soft spot for. Women who give their all, receive little in return, and internalize their pain as completely as they can in order to get up the next morning and do it all again, are far more numerous than men or even their flashier sisters want to acknowledge.

The words on the "page" of this book (remembering I read it on a Kindle) are much like Jean herself is, simply presented and unassumingly powerful. The joys of life on a farm aren't very alluring to our many and various urbanite communities (despite the astounding number of books published by self-exiled urbanites; if it was a common thing, there wouldn't be a market for the tales, right?), since they involve very very hard physical labor and a non-stop calendar of battles against entropy. Some are won, the calf is born and the heifer gets right up to suckle it; some are lost, buildings and lives rot as they're used and used and used but can't be unused long enough to tend to their needs. In Jean's life she has lost a lot, beginning with her mother's early death, proceeding to a miserable life with her drunken grieving father, and then to the hard life of living within sight of a prize you can never, ever have. The episode with the pearls...well, if you can read that and not suffer for Jean, I don't want to know you.

It seemed to me that Jean said "I couldn't" and "I can't" a lot. That was in keeping with her character, but made me want to scream "but you already ARE and you always have been DOING IT ALL!" In the search we all live from day to day, that blind rooting around for kernels of sustenance for our deepest desires and hopes, Jean finds nothing that she doesn't immediately give to someone else. Her strength is astounding. The people she supports are, I suppose, worthy of her effort. I can't be fully sure, because we only see out of Jean's eyes and she's already decided they're worthy. I wonder if I'd like any of these folks in the flesh.

If I'm not being clear, I thought this was a wonderful book and a delightfully engrossing read. It had one or two nits I'd pick (eg, the beehive was invented in 1960 so no one would've worn one in 1952; Music Man debuted in 1957, so couldn't have been the play put on in 1952, either), but they're nits. I would strongly recommend investing your eyeblinks in this feminized modern Ethan Frome-ish novel. I am very glad that I did, and I'm a tough sell.