Along Comes a Stranger

This is a great book. I read it in three nights. The author nails the area to a tee and surprized the hell out of me at the end. Well worth the read.

Dorie McCullough Lawson, the daughter of historian David McCullough, has already authored, fittingly enough, a well-received non-fiction volume entitled, POSTERITY: LETTERS OF GREAT AMERICANS TO THEIR CHILDREN. Now her first work of fiction, ALONG COMES A STRANGER, makes a different kind of mark. STRANGER doesn't take place in Revolutionary War or Civil War or even Cold War America. It's 1995 and the town is Hayden, Wyoming. Protagonist and narrator Kate Colter bookends and occasionally laces her story with present day commentary, but in the main she tells it as if she were living it again day by day. She's the wife of George, a paleontologist who teaches and goes on digs, and the mother of a young, touchingly fragile girl who helps Kate care for the sick or wounded animals they board in their barn. In easy, conversational blobs, Kate tells about the geography near Hayden, of her own childhood back East, how women follow men to hardy states like Wyoming but men don't hardly follow women there, and about the uncurious natures of the folks in Hayden. The uncurious lot includes her mother-in-law, Lorraine, who is the salt of the earth, good at crafts and organizing parties, but hasn't a spit of intellectual curiosity. Kate admits to her own tendency to be scatterbrained and less than tidy, and she knows she causes her mother back in Massachusetts consternation because she isn't a go-getter professionally. Kate is obviously sensitive to her part-time employment status, but not enough to change it. Her aunt and best friend is an unmarried, driven, career woman in Boston. The two relax together on the phone dissecting current and past high profile crimes (like the O.J. trial). Kate laments the American love affair with TV, but tickles her own entertainment bone with speculations about where FBI Most Wanted List toppers might be this very minute. Frankly at loose ends with her life, Kate takes a friendly shine to Lorraine's new boyfriend, just come to town. She is instinctively intrigued (not romantically, she hastens to assure) by the tall, courteous, reserved, sixtyish man called Tom because he shows interest in her husband's fossil-hunting (not, as we've seen, something the locals do) and he is at the Custer Battleground on the day she takes her daughter, Clara. As Tom, Kate, and Clara pace the famous field together, Tom gives a tour-guide sketch of who was where and who killed whom when. But, the more time Kate spends with Tom, the more she wonders whether he, as he says, is really from Ohio. She begins to suspect he isn't who he says he is. Her crime intuitions then color how she acts with Tom too, and, in turn, his guard goes up. Finally, the tension snaps into violence that is oddly a natural conclusion but also unexpectedly dissonant, unnecessary, and sad. It's as though Flannery O'Connor turned her astringent, perverse pen on Wyoming. A quick look at the cover might lead a reader to peg ALONG COMES A STRANGER as a typical summer read about s

There are a couple of things this book is not. It is not a cookie-cutter suspense/mystery written according to a "paint-by-numbers" formula (if mixed metaphors are permissible). It is also not written by someone who grew up "back East" now in search (in vain) of her inner "cowboy voice" (two or three summers on a dude ranch does not a Louis L'Amour make). Instead, Ms. Lawson offers a richly detailed glimpse of modern western, small-town life from an authentic perspective. Her main character/narrator captures things as they are, relaying her observations with a dry, often humorous editorial, all against the backdrop of a mystery that unfolds in the absence of a crime. The conventional "action" of the story comes only at the end, after a long, suspenseful build-up that is a joy to read. If you are looking for a typical western/mystery, with the principal action/crime on page 13, followed by pages of scintillating dialog involving the words "yep", "nope", "ma'am" and descriptions of chewing tobacco, all concluding with plot twist (gasp) / large-caliber firearm / dead villain, you should continue to the checkout aisle. If you are looking for something authentic, that is both witty and new, this is your book.