Counting Coup

Set in the South, Gearino's artfully crafted and multifaceted second novel begins when first-person narrator Tad Beckman, a columnist for a small-town South Carolina newspaper, gets a call from a woman seeking help in her efforts to escape from an abusive relationship. Beckman's terse advice, ""Just leave,"" comes back to haunt him when he lands a job with a major daily in Miami and befriends a mysterious woman named Jocelyn at a local beach. A series of subsequent meetings leads to a passionate affair that quickly intertwines Beckman's professional and personal life when Jocelyn reveals that her own battering husband, Laney Pritchard, is a corrupt local developer who's involved in a multimillion-dollar real estate scam. Using documentation provided by his lover, Beckman breaks the story in a front-page column, only to find that he's been duped by Jocelyn, who disappears from his life after planting the false evidence. Driven by the depth of his connection with Jocelyn and by the mysterious circumstances surrounding her disappearance, Beckman travels to the South Carolina coast to find her, only to discover surprising truths about his own tragic family history. Using different voices to jump back and forth in time and connect the various story lines, Gearino masterfully explores many of the same issues involving absent fathers and fractured families that made his first novel, What the Deaf Mute Heard, noteworthy. Beckman is a memorable protagonist, and this suspenseful and surprising tale resonates on many levels. (July)