Reviews

• A well thought out thriller with plenty of scope for further delving into the main character of Henry Farrell. This was easy to imagine as a TV franchise similar in feel to The Ozarks.I couldn't help but imagine Opie (the big bearded biker from Sons of Anarchy) as Henry.

• Started off badly but made up for it as you got into it

• It's mid-March, and the snow has just started to melt in the Wild Thyme Township of Northern Pennsylvania. Officer Henry Farrell has been a policeman in this rural county for 2 years, close to where he was born. He fled back here from Wyoming, where his wife died slowly and painfully from an environmental cancer. It pretty much killed him, too. So as a person and as an officer of the law, he speaks little, absorbs much, and carries physical pain as if it is irrelevant, because nothing could hurt worse than what he's been through. But we don't find that out right away. First we see Henry is in the local clinic. The doctor called him over because she's pulling buckshot out of Danny Stiobhard (pronounced Steward). Danny assures Henry that there's no hard feelings with Aub Dunigan, the old man who shot him, which makes you wonder just what Danny had been up to. Henry takes Kevin, Aub's younger cousin, when he goes to talk to the old man: "The old man's voice shook and he had trouble with his consonants; it took concentration to understand the words that tumbled out half formed and angry. What I made out was this: 'He been coming on my land and cutting trees. They stole my wheels. Seen him coming on up again and I let him have one. But I didn't have nothing to do with that boy.' He closed his eyes and turned his head to the side. 'What boy is that, now?' 'One you're coming on up to collect.' I turned to Kevin, who was all bewilderment. I state the obvious, 'We're here about Danny Stiobhard.' 'Fellow got killed up in my woods. You got to come on up and collect him.... Found him yesterday. Mountain let go and I found him.' " They follow the confused Aub's directions, and there he is. A young man with a shoulder and arm ripped right off him. His body had been stuffed under a huge rock crevice and the melting snow let him go, just like Aub said. For a murder, the county sheriff and state police are called in. Nobody local thinks that Aub did it, but that means finding someone else who did. They call the dead man JD, for John Doe. Henry muses: "In more ways than one, he didn't look like someone from around here. Poor people aren't thin anymore, like when I was a kid; now they're fat on the cheap food feeding the ghost of the American dream. This kid was thin, almost extravagantly so. In the slightly more civilized setting of the morgue, I had a sense of sophistication, even wealth." There is a lot of love in "Dry Bones in the Valley", but it's mostly love lost or love crippled. Tim Bouman does an excellent job of setting the tone of this rural setting. The characters are well-drawn, too, especially Henry, the hard-headed protagonist. It's the pace and mystery plotting where "Dry Bones in the Valley" falters for me. Too often there seems to be conversations about not much that don't add to the plot. When the end comes, it seemed to me to be in a last minute rush. A lot of loose ends are tied up after we discover who the murderer is, but the extra 16 pages seemed to take too long, an anti-climax. Overall, a nice book that I'll recommend, but not quite a 5-star mystery for me. Happy Reader

• Je l'ai mis à la poubelle, c'est un plagiat.

• Okay not so bad. May read it. It is nicht first class thriller. Sometime somehow stretchy. Tension can be tolerated.

Purchase links