When you're "peering out at the world through the eyeholes" of a hockey goalie's mask, you may miss a lot of things. In this notable debut mystery featuring small-town journalist Gus Carpenter, some of those things may be your own inadequacies.
Years before, in the final moments of a state championship game, Carpenter lost sight of the puck and missed the save. His team was defeated and his hometown, a "two-stoplight town clinging to the southeastern tip of a frozen lake in northern Michigan" turned on him. As soon as he was able, Carpenter fled to a newspaper in Detroit, carrying the weight of that loss like two-ton shoulder pads. His plan -- someday return with a Pulitzer in his duffel bag and then the town would have to forgive him.
Problem is that redemption, no matter how heartfelt, doesn't come easy. In Detroit, Carpenter "lets the big story go between his legs," and so "after failing miserably" -- again -- he returns home, accepting the job of assistant editor at the local paper while rethinking his game plan. Carpenter's defeats have distorted his perceptions and worn down his fight.
When bits of a snowmobile wash up on shore, belonging to the town's beloved hockey coach who drowned years before -- on a different lake -- it takes Carpenter a long time to get the "blurred contours of the truth" into focus.
Mysteries rooted in a sport, as this one is, can sometimes cling to clichés for emotional depth. Gruley is far too smart a writer for that (he's the Chicago bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal). His characters are genuinely flawed and, Carpenter especially, honestly likable. Gruley's gripping plot unfolds like a piece of investigative journalism with revelations suggested by small details (a gap in the coach's past, a number of shady real estate deals, the unscrupulous competition between two resorts) building to a pattern that uncovers some disturbing personal realities for Carpenter as well as the realization that the town's future is "anchored in an ugly past."
The subgenre of the procedural mystery has long been the bailiwick of the police detective or the forensic investigator, but over the past decade writers like Denise Mina and her Paddy Meehan series, G.M. Ford's Frank Corso, and Laura Lippmann's Tess Monaghan have cut into this mystery territory. Bryan Gruley's new series promises to be an admirable addition to this field of play.
Carole Barrowman is a professor of English at Alverno College in Milwaukee. She blogs at www.carolebarrowman.com.
