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.

THE TOWN OF BABYLON, coming-of-(middle)-age story set in familiar suburbia

THE TOWN OF BABYLON
ALEJANDRO VARELA
Astra House
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Shortlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction! Awards will be presented on 16 November 2022.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this contemporary debut novel—an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity —Andrés, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband’s infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends.

Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds.

Captivating and poignant; a modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community, The Town of Babylon is a page-turning novel about young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.

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

My Review: This is a debut novel.

I wanted to get that out there now, because while it's not perfect...it was going to be a three-and-a-half-star read until a certain point...it's got the extra insight and clarity to lift the read to the next level. A polyphonic novel that travels back and forth between the 1990s, when Andrés left Babylon, and now, when his return is less an actual return than a retreat from the mess in his present-day life enabled by his sudden discovery that his mother needs help caring for his gravely ill father.

Andrés is a first-generation American, his parents immigrants whose relationship to the USA is fraught with the usual complexities and exacerbated by their closeted-but-clearly-queer son. His unhappiness, his entire life being spent trying to hide and not to call attention to himself, impacted them...but we're not really, despite the set-up, here for them. And that would've made things a lot more agreeable to me had we been let into that experience...but that isn't Andrés's story to tell. So, no sense blaming the story for not delivering something it didn't promise me.

As Andrés spends time with the awful US health-care system, he also decides whether his marital issues might be contextualized by a trip to his twentieth high-school reunion. (I've never been to a high-school reunion...leaving that place was a joy, going back seems perverse.) It's here that I begin to think, "oh boy, here we go down Bad-Memory Lane" and I was vindicated. A homophobe that Andrés strongly suspects was involved in an act of lethal anti-gay violence? A preacher now! His first love? Married with children! Tick, tick, tick as the expected dominoes fall. What saves the story is the anti-capitalist anger of it:

The suburbs are where people go to preserve their ignorance, in service of a delusion they've mistaken for a dream. They tired of the more interesting human experiment and fled. Cowards, the lot. Working class, middle class, and one-percenters alike.
–and–
There are places in this world where people worry less intensely and with less frequency. Places where the hierarchy isn't stretched tall and people aren't perched high above their loved ones. Egalitarian places, where families don't have to be self-contained battalions constantly defending against their neighbors and other strangers. But not here.

I completely concur. I, in fact, would go far more into the area...which is why we're reading Author Varela's book, not mine. It's a very interesting story for the middle-aged multitudes, this review of the past to come to some peace with the present. But honestly, I'm past middle age and I was getting more than a little antsy with a storytelling technique that I myownself feel works best in stories about younger people, eg The Prophets.

Then I read this:

Going home makes it impossible to forget the past, but it also ushers the past into the present, reconstructing it, making it easier to face.

And the view snapped into focus, I added that half-star back, and am recommending the read to you whole-heartedly.