White Crosses - Hardcover

Watson, Larry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671567713 ISBN 13: 9780671567712

Publisher: Atria, 1997

Synopsis

When the married principal of the local elementary school and a recent high-school graduate turn up dead in a car crash, Sheriff Jack Nevelsen tries to protect the town of Bentrock from the truth about why the two had been in the car together. By the author of Montana 1948. Tour.

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Reviews

The coverup of a scandal by a well-intentioned Montana sheriff and its devastating consequences lie at the heart of this sequel to the well-received Montana 1948 (1993). Sheriff Jack Nevelsen is an unlikely law-and-order candidate; he prefers observation to action, and he doesn't carry a gun. He's also quietly going mad. In the claustrophobic precincts of the town of Bentrock, Nevelsen is bound to break; it begins when a wrecked car is found bearing the body of the respected high-school principal Leo Bauer--and that of a high-school senior, June Moss. Acting reflexively, Nevelsen concocts a story that Leo was helping his son Rick elope with June. During the course of forcing the story on Rick, an unpopular boy who disliked his father; on Leo's wife, Vivien; and on June's hapless and confused mother, he unleashes his own deepest hatreds: for his marriage to the frightened, repressed Nora; for his job; for his small town and its way of crippling lives. The plot often loses its way in random digressions and blatant attempts to forge connections between Montana's landscape and the sheriff's unraveling life and mind, yet much rings true: Nevelsen's need to ``protect'' society from knowledge; his perception that Leo was a good man, despite his flaws; his own manipulations to bring himself closer to the enigmatic, sexy Vivien. But the emergence of the truth--that Vivien knew Leo was leaving her; that Nora knows her marriage to Nevelsen dangles on a precipice; that he is heir to a family propensity for madness--is obscured by the gimmicky presence of June's cougar- hunting uncle Ralph, who stalks Nevelsen. Powerful in its evocation of awkward rural lives lunging for any sort of consummation, even if the result is destruction, this frequently haunting portrait of a doomed man is an unlikely but compelling blend of Appointment in Samarra and A River Runs Through It. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Watson (Montana 1948, LJ 9/15/93) is being hailed as the new voice of the American West. Here, a small-town sheriff investigates the deaths of an elementary school principal and a female student.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Watson, author of Montana 1948 (1993) and Justice (1995), returns to Bentrock, Montana, for another look at the cauldron of emotions roiling beneath a small town's placid surface. It's 1957 this time, and the key player is county sheriff Jack Nevelson, who shoulders the burden of protecting his neighbors from the truth about a fatal car accident that claimed the lives of the high-school principal and a teenage girl, who were running away together. Using an almost stream-of-consciousness technique, Watson takes us inside Jack's head, and as we listen to his rambling, tortured thoughts, we realize that at the core of his obsession to preserve the town's innocence is the need to protect himself from some uncomfortable realizations about his own situation. The inner life of a repressed man in a repressed town is necessarily a relatively inaccessible subject, and if this daring, demanding, occasionally brilliant novel lacks the immediate impact and simple eloquence of Watson's earlier books, it is no less worthy of attention. Bill Ott

Edition details

• Publisher: Atria
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0671567713
• ISBN 13: 9780671567712
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384