All Around Me Peaceful

A marvelous novel filled with the beauties and hardships of life in the West

For two years Neil Shanks has been living in Gold Hill, Colorado, putting off the moment when he must return to the family lumber business in Michigan—a business built from the fortune his great-grandfather mysteriously made over a century earlier. Driven by a hunch that it was a fortune founded on shame, young Shanks searches Gold Hill’s town records and collective memory, seeking clues to family secrets.

But then suddenly it’s hunting season, and Neil’s friend, Becky Carlsson, fails to keep a rendezvous with her braggart husband, Finn, at their mountain campsite. With her disappearance, the rumors about what might have happened—between husband and wife or between Becky and Neil—start swirling around town. And as Saturday turns into Sunday, nobody in the rescue effort has to be reminded of the odds against survival.

All Around Me Peaceful celebrates but never sentimentalizes the men and women who choose to live in this land of plenty, whose stunning beauty and abundance is matched only by the mysteries lurking at its heart.

Neil Shanks journeys from Michigan to a small Colorado town in order to unveil the mystery surrounding the origins of his great-grandfather's considerable wealth. He befriends married but hot-blooded Becky Carlsson and lends her serious literature, prompting a salt-of-the-earth local to ask the hackneyed question: " 'You think the books have made her different?' " As snow begins to fall, Becky disappears on her way to meet her husband in the mountains. The search for her is so extensive that it becomes emblematic of Everyman's quest for existential enlightenment. Subthemes here concern Native American claims, elk-hunting season and a sheriff unable to arrive at independent moral decisions. But the drama is too slender to support these overworked discourses and ends anticlimactically and with lame truisms: "But Becky had changed him. She had shown him a person's history could not tell him what he was capable of or what he might do next." Nelson is the author of Cold Wind River.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.