Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. There's danger at the end of the line in this unconventional mystery.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. By the time Jack and Alison encounter a young woman running down the road in a hospital gown in a scene right out of the sinister noir Kiss Me Deadly, they’re in too deep, and they’re too curious, to quit the dangerous puzzle before them. The author clearly knows his way around a river the long, descriptive passages create a vivid sense of place and action even if they may puzzle those of us who don’t know a mayfly from a riffle.
But this is no escape, unless you’re the reader. He describes one of his favorite poets as “an aficionado of loss and also of nature, which Jack could relate to.” Jack has lost both his mother and his best friend, and he blames himself for both deaths. Jack has a thing for eighth-century Chinese poetry. This is an unconventional mystery, an unconventional romance, and an unconventional adventure, creepy and spiritual in equal measure. He also happens to be falling in love with Alison K., the famous but effortlessly earthy singer he's been assigned to guide through a week of good fishing. The new guide, a grief-stricken 25-year-old named Jack, happens to be a keen observer with an eye for the out of the ordinary. And the manager seems to have a fast-and-loose relationship with the truth.
Guests disappear for stretches at a time and return acting as if they’re survived a horrible trauma. The neighbor upstream likes to shoot at visitors who get too close to his property. It's a nice getaway from the persistent strains of Covid-19. The high-end Colorado resort at the heart of this soulful mystery offers some of the best angling in the country, with waters seemingly carved out of Eden. Fisherman’s noir isn’t a genre, but maybe it should be.
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