Road to Redemption

NORTH

By Frederick Busch. Norton. 302 pp. $24.95

Talk about your demons. This man Jack has got demons. Big, bad, dark, implacable, 24/7 demons. He has been around a while, loping through a couple of very fine novels: Girls , published in 1997, and now North , both from renowned story craftsman Frederick Busch. The demons don't seem to be mellowing with age. Thankfully, neither does Jack.

Having failed at just about everything, most particularly at being a father, a husband and a cop, Jack has fled his native turf in upstate New York and gone to ground on the Carolina coast, where he's found himself a dead-end job as a bouncer at a beach resort. He is, as he notes sardonically, "climbing slowly down the ladder of police work."

Enter the classy brunette. Merle Davidoff, Manhattan attorney, pushing six feet, with a slightly crooked nose, turns up at Jack's place of employment and promptly requires rescuing. Jack obliges, seemingly from force of habit. One thing leads to the next, the way things do. Over coffee and sour mash, Merle pitches a rescue offer of her own: She wants to hire Jack to track down her errant nephew, a ne'er-do-well in his late twenties, last seen in the company of some heavy-duty characters back up north. He might be okay. But you get the feeling that he is not. You get the feeling that this job will be no simple gumshoe affair, and that Merle is, like a proper film noir heroine, trouble with a capital T.

It goes without saying that Jack takes the case. And that the case will turn out to be tougher and more painful than anything he bargained for. And that, when he points his aging pickup north on I-95, bound for New York, he will find himself on a collision course not only with his destiny but also with his past.

Enter the demons. Dead wife, dead child, severed friendships, unpaid emotional debts. Conflicts never settled. A corpse never found. Questions never answered. Questions never asked. The trail of the missing nephew leads Jack right back to a landscape he hoped to have put behind him forever: the worn-down, unlovable countryside a few hours north of New York City, familiar to readers of Girls and also, according to Jack, to readers of James Fenimore Cooper.

"This was a part of the state known for not very much. . . . It was rough country. It was as battered-looking as the worst I had seen of New England. It was more scoured out by poverty. It was some of what made them crazy up there. The brutal winters were part of it too. I knew that. People there kept a distance from each other. That used to comfort me."

Cut to the present. Jack looks for a base camp for the coming manhunt.

A dowdy real estate agent gives him a few addresses. " 'We don't usually send the renters off on their own,' she said.

" 'But I have an honest face?'

". . . 'Well, you've got a face. I'll give you that.' "

Dashiell Hammett's fingerprints are easy to spot here. The narrative, the dialogue, the pacing of a scene can be as stylized as anything that ever passed between Bogie and Bacall. But a closer look reveals something more postmodern, a kind of knowingness shared by author and reader. We know what kind of story this is, we think; but then no, maybe we don't. Sometimes Busch's fictional world seems oddly familiar, in mood or mise-en-scène if not in detailed topography. At other times it is wholly unmapped terrain, full of surprises, most of them grim, some nightmarish.

Jack is an irresistible protagonist, a walking train wreck of a man from whom you can't turn away your eyes. He is part hard-boiled detective and part tragic hero, limping blindly toward some unforeseeable fate. North is by turns a thriller, a morality play, a lengthy interior monologue, a plunge into the psychological abyss.

It's also a damn good book. Not the sort of thing, perhaps, that keeps you awake all night, flipping the pages: Many readers will find it too intense, and too saddening, for that. But the sort that gets you quickly in its grip and keeps you there, hanging on for the ride until the final secret is revealed. And then wishing there were just a few pages more. ·

Richard Grant's novels include "In the Land of Winter" and "Tex and Molly in the Afterlife." He lives in Maine.