Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
William Morrow, 2010, $24.99, 274 pages, ISBN 978-0-06-059466-4
This week’s Mysterious Book Report, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, is about one of those students. The odd one out . . .the forgotten and overlooked . . . the poor kid who’s shunned, alone, afraid and often bullied. His name is Larry Ott and he’s all grown up now, still living in the same little hardscrabble town in southeast Mississippi, and still friendless . . . shunned by everyone in town. But it wasn’t always like that. As a youngster, Larry, a white boy, had a friend. His name; Silas “32” Jones, a black boy, whose life becomes defined by baseball, while Larry’s is defined by the disappearance of a girl named Cindy Walker . . . Larry Ott’s only date in high school. A girl who disappeared while on that date . . . a girl whose body has never been found in the intervening 20 years . . . a girl presumed dead at the hands of Larry Ott. The lantern lamp of suspicion has never been removed, and Larry goes about his daily routine as a prisoner in a cage without bars erected by the court of public opinion.
After another young woman disappears, Larry Ott is ambushed as the book opens and he lies in a coma at a local hospital. The story is told in a series of flashbacks through the eyes of Silas, his one time friend, who’s now a local law enforcement officer. As the old and new mysteries unfold however, we learn there is much more to Larry and Silas’s stories than we were first led to believe.
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is complex, intellectual and certainly blurs the line between literature and genre (mystery) fiction. That said however, although I feel that the plotting and arc of the story are exemplary; I think the pacing is slow because of the amount of minutiae. A minor criticism to be sure, but one that detracted from my enjoyment of the book, the rest of which is highly recommended.
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