Deirdre McNamer

This here is a great example of coming across a book randomly, it having no reviews and turning out to be a great read. So good in fact that I have added it to the Favorites collection this year.

First, the setting. A senior apartment complex called Pheasant Run, Montana. Chief characters Cassie, Viola, Leo Uberti, all residents. Herbie, manager. And finally, Lander Maki, chief fire inspector.

This last because once the fire is discovered in Herbie's apartment, nothing is quite right again at Pheasant Run. Maki is an extraordinarily gifted man for his job: with his preternatural sense of smell, we are sure he will uncover the mystery behind this fire. Meanwhile we get to know Cassie, a widow whose only daughter is also dead. Viola, hesitantly typing up her memoirs while being on the brink of uncovering something sinister at Pheasant Run. Leo Uberti, 89, spry and courtly, a gifted oil painter. But is that all he is?

Maki takes his time, employing his own special methods of investigation. The police are also involved very soon, for Herbie has disappeared but so has Viola. Then there's also a wayward teenager named Clayton who takes refuge in the basement storage area to get away from a dangerous school bully; he falls into an uneasy yet nurturing relationship with the perceptive Cassie. Maki's wife Rhonda, who herself has another preternatural ability: that of communicating with animals. And it's not hokum, mind you. Pay special attention to what it is that the cat alerts Rhonda to.

Alas, tragedy occurs. Fourteen months later, having solved the fire mystery at Pheasant Run, we meet Maki again. A small glimmer of hope arises in the very last few wintry pages of this slow-moving delight of a story. Slow-moving like a broad, peaceful, river, I mean. With depth and reflection. Shadows. A wind whipping up unknown currents. I began to wonder if our good author Deirdre McNamer is a poet. She writes with such empathy that I was fully involved in the lives of these elderly, lonely folks; truly saddened with the death that occurs late in the story; fearful for our bullied teenager, undeniably relieved when Cassie helps avert a disaster from occuring in his life.

Such is the power of writing. I'm thrilled to have this author in my library, and very pleased that I'll be able to recommend this undeservedly unknown little gem to like-minded readers. Hurrah for taking chances! (And for being curious enough about a book cover to pick it up in the first place.)… (plus d'informations)

Deirdre McNamer's RED ROVER is something of a puzzle, but in a good way. Its diverse characters and its time jumps from 1920s Montana to the post-war 1940s and then all the way to present day force you to pay attention, so you can put the various pieces of the story together. Like the jigsaw puzzles that are depicted as popular with the patients of the Missoula rehabilitation center/nursing home where some of the characters end up - and where lives which once touched only tangentially finally intersect, perhaps for the last time.

The story is of two brothers, Neil and Aidan Tierney; one becomes a B-29 pilot flying out of Saipan over Japan, the other an FBI agent sent undercover to Argentina, supposedly to ferret out Nazis. A third man, Roland Taliaferro, who has escaped a hard life in the Butte copper mines to attend college and law school, figures prominently in their lives and stories as a 'good friend' of Aidan, who follows him into the FBI just before the war. Other characters are Opal Mix, an eccentric rural nurse who becomes a town coroner, and Wendell Whitcomb, fatherless and rudderless, who straightens himself out and becomes a newspaper reporter. McNamer skillfully weaves all of these disparate characters into a web of intrigue, betrayals and ruined lives, but she makes you work. She makes you think about how lives really do come together, drift or ricochet apart, and then converge again - all over a period of several eventful decades.

I was riveted by this complex tale. McNamer is an outstanding storyteller. Add her to the growing list of great writers coming out of the modern American West. Highly recommended.… (plus d'informations)