Coldwater

Parker follows his well-received debut, Purgatory Road, with an overwrought suspense novel. Michael Sullivan, a recently released convict, was heading home to Coldwater, a remote town in an unnamed state, when he ran into a group of vengeful men who buried him alive in a forest. Michael manages to dig himself out of the ground, but more ordeals lie ahead, as the people of Coldwater have always hated him for murdering his younger brother as a child years earlier. Even his sister makes a special trip back to Coldwater to kill him. Scraps of Michael’s memories alternate with fitful glimpses into the minds of his hunters, each of whom embodies a different facet of mob violence. Amid all the philosophizing about guilt and innocence, rage and regret, crime and punishment, Parker clumsily injects a supernatural complication: demonic possession. Lurid images and often muddled prose (“he carried an absorbed twin in his cells which whispered despair”) make Michael’s sad story a bathetic, not tragic, comment on the inevitable wages of sin. (Jan.)