A Wasteland of Strangers

The arrival of an enigmatic stranger, John Faith, in Pomo, a small, isolated town in northern California, unleashes a series of threatening, ominous emotions and events that culminate in the murder of a beautiful and lonely woman, a crime in which Faith becomes the prime suspect.

The latest product of Pronzini's recent fascination with the bad chemistry between tight little towns and catalytic strangers (Blue Lonesome, 1995; Sentinels, 1996) brings big, ugly wanderer John C. Faith to Pomo, a lakeside hamlet in Pronzini's favorite northern California wilds. Faith's picked a bad weekend to come to Pomo, since bank president George Petrie, desperate to cover his minor defalcations, is about to pull off a major robbery of his own bank; Indian teacher Audrey Sixkiller is getting threatened by a masked rapist; and aptly named widow Storm Carey, who's slept with half the men in town, keeps her very last assignation while Faith, who absently deflected her first come-on between bites of his restaurant meal, is on his way to her place. Faith manages to get away from police chief Richard Novak, but Novak, still burning from the memory of Storm's fiery embraces, isn't about to take Faith's escape lying down. And the outcast women who somehow know they can trust Faith--an unhappily pregnant teen, a waitress who gave up nursing school to marry the brute who beats her, and even, in the end, Audrey Sixkiller herself--only seem to be making more trouble for themselves. Pronzini nails his familiar small-town meanies--the bigots, the cheats, the tiny-souled righteous--with an unerring eye. Only the alcoholic newspaperman who talks to his gun, and maybe the enigmatic Faith himself, miss the bull's-eye. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Beneath the surface in the northern California resort community of Pomo swirls a viper's nest of desire, jealousy, loneliness, and crime. When a sexual assault occurs, the obvious suspect is an outsider, John Faith; after all, the sheriff doesn't like Faith's interest in a sexy local widow he fancies himself. Neither does a boozy reporter, who launches a yellow-journalism campaign against the outsider. When the widow is murdered, the town explodes. Pronzini, the author of the extraordinary "Nameless" detective series (see starred review, p.1667), rotates the first-person narrative among the main characters as if they were sitting around a campfire and picking up the story where the previous teller left off. It's a difficult technique to execute successfully, but Pronzini pulls it off by providing each narrator with a unique voice and personal context. The result, as in Stephen Dobyns' Church of Dead Girls , is a thriller in which a small town's fear of the unknown drives the action. Highly recommended. Wes Lukowsky