cover image A Brother's Blood

A Brother's Blood

Michael C. White. HarperCollins Publishers, $22.5 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-06-018667-8

Remarkably controlled for a first novel, this literary thriller from a Pushcart nominee for short fiction tells of a malignant secret that comes back to haunt the denizens of a backwoods Maine logging community that was once the site of a WWII labor camp for German POWs. In her never-ending struggle to nurse her alcoholic brother Leon back to sobriety, narrator Libby Pelletier, the 61-year-old proprietor of a local country store and cafe, brings him home from the VA hospital in Augusta. Coincidental to Leon's homecoming, Libby, whose deceased father once ran the local logging operation for a giant paper company, is visited by a German on a pilgrimage to clarify the puzzling circumstances of his brother's death following his escape from the POW camp in March 1945. At the time, both Libby and her brother were teenagers working with her father's crew. After Libby receives foreboding phone calls from an anonymous man asking to speak to her brother, Leon is found dead; shortly thereafter, Libby is warned against making further inquiries into the young POW's death. Tension increases and the mystery deepens as the determined Libby, thwarted by coverups and menaced by insidious forces, stumbles down one blind alley after another as she searches for the truth behind the two deaths. Shuttling deftly between past and present, driven by undercurrents of latent energy, this novel marks White as a talented and energetic writer. U.K, translation rights: Sobel, Weber. (Oct.)