Homecomings, especially long-delayed ones, can be hard. Unresolved emotions and buried secrets sometimes bubble to the surface when the wanderer finally returns. That subject alone would be fitting for the sort of story that's distinguished Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo's long career. But with Under the Falls, he's connected that theme to an engrossing mystery. The result is a novel that's reminiscent of the work of writers such as Richard Price and Dennis Lehane, who've blended character-driven fiction with the crime genre.
In Nobody's Fool and its companions in his North Bath Trilogy, Russo (Life and Art) has created vivid portraits of struggling working-class towns in upstate New York. With Stone Mountain, "a place that doesn't yield many good outcomes," he returns to that familiar territory. Popular singer-songwriter Tyler Sinclair reluctantly is heading back to his hometown, 18 years after he left without a word to family or friends.
Before embarking on a lengthy tour, he's there to perform a benefit concert for his childhood friend Doc, paralyzed as a teenager in an accident while diving into the Falls with Tyler's help and now stripped of his Medicaid benefits. But the concert descends into chaos during its final number when the audience learns that Doc has died suddenly that evening. Afterward, the limo carrying Tyler is forced off a country road into a ravine by another vehicle. That crash sets the mystery plot into motion.
As the singer slowly recovers from his extensive injuries, his continued presence increases the pressure on Curt--the town's chief of police and another childhood friend of Tyler's who witnessed Doc's diving accident--to unravel the suspicious circumstances of the crash. These events also revive Curt's memories of Tyler's youthful attraction to his wife, Freddi, drawing the net that surrounds these characters ever tighter and forcing a moral reckoning for the man left behind when his best friend fled and achieved celebrity. Russo is attentive to the machinations of this plot while maintaining his focus on his characters' internal struggles. Chapters alternate mostly between the perspectives of Tyler, Curt, and Deb, a young Stone Mountain police officer who's torn between her loyalty to the chief and her fears that something is seriously amiss in his life.
Despite the occasional implausibility--such as why outside law enforcement personnel doesn't arrive to reinforce Stone Mountain's tiny police department in investigating a serious injury to a prominent entertainer--Russo successfully manages the novel's plot twists to maintain the balance between a character-driven story and the tropes of traditional crime novels. Under the Falls will please his longtime readers and undoubtedly attract some new ones. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Richard Russo marries a story of memories and secrets in a small upstate New York town to a mystery surrounding a catastrophic accident involving a musician who returns there after a long absence.