By Patrick Anderson,
whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers@aol.com
Monday, December 17, 2007

CHILLWATER COVE

By Thomas Lakeman

St. Martin's Minotaur. 325 pp. $24.95

Quite a few novels reviewed here recently have been political in one way or another. Jo Nesbo's "The Redbreast" concerns fascists in Norway. Eliot Pattison's "Prayer of the Dragon" dramatizes Chinese repression in Tibet. Richard Kunzmann's "Salamander Cotton" recalls South African apartheid. Robert Harris's "The Ghost" scrutinizes an English prime minister much like Tony Blair. For all these writers, a crime story opened the door to a larger world of political corruption.

At first, Thomas Lakeman's second novel, "Chillwater Cove," does not seem to fit this pattern. It appears to be yet another account of a sexy but intrepid female FBI agent in pursuit of a serial killer. That is the spine of Lakeman's story, but his novel slowly becomes more than that: a troubling account of social forces that have been in conflict in the American South for two centuries or more and remain in conflict today.

Lakeman sets his story around the fictional Avalon University in Tennessee. The author is an Alabaman who graduated from the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tenn., and his Avalon strongly resembles Sewanee in its physical beauty, its isolation on a mountaintop and its "aloofness from the modern world." Whether Lakeman considers his alma mater to be as dark and dangerous as his fictional Avalon, I cannot say, but the latter is definitely not where you'd send your offspring to pursue the good, the true and the beautiful.

FBI Special Agent Peggy Weaver grew up in Avalon and attended the university. Her father, Rusty Weaver, is the town's grizzled old police chief. When Peggy was a girl, she and her best friend, Samantha, were accosted by a man while walking in the woods. Peggy escaped, but Samantha was captured and sexually abused before being freed. Now, as an adult, Samantha vanishes from her home, possibly abducted by the same man, and Peggy must find her. She is soon caught up in a mystery as impenetrable as the woods that surround the university for miles in every direction.

The novel's conflicts involve three groups. First are the moneyed whites who control the university. They are represented by Samantha's father, Harrison Stallworth, the university's president; his ancestor, the Confederate general who founded it; and her husband, who is slated to be its next president. All of these stalwart gentlemen prove, upon examination, to be less than sterling characters, and the students we meet are mostly sex-crazed cretins. So much for the Southern aristocracy.

Samantha, before her second abduction, had been researching a book about the history of Avalon, and had made contact with the Melungeons, a tribe of mixed white, African and Native American ancestry that has lived in the forest nearby since 1600. Indeed, those who survive believe Avalon Mountain is rightfully theirs. The third group is the poor whites who have long rallied to the Ku Klux Klan and lynch mobs to keep down the Melungeons and other nonwhites. The novel's chief villain is a psychopathic Southern racist, and there isn't much doubt that at some point Peggy will fall into his sadistic clutches.

In the meantime, she has her hands full trying to sort out all the potential villains lurking about. Samantha's handsome husband is a sneaky devil; Peggy's own father, the police chief, is not much better; and even her FBI boss may be a crook. This is a novel in which people die in surprising ways -- from snake venom, rocket-propelled grenades, mysterious explosions -- miraculously escape near-certain death and prove to have unexpected parentage. At times I grew impatient with the bizarre plot twists, but I came to accept them, even to enjoy their ingenuity. It helped that the pace is fast and the prose often tasty. One Southern charmer, seeing that Peggy's glass of bourbon is too strong for her, asks, "Would you like some water on that?" -- "on," not "in," which is just right.

As I neared the end of "Chillwater Cove," I came to think that Lakeman was dealing less in literal truth than in the mythology of the South. He wants to remind us how educated whites have for centuries divided and kept down both the poor whites and people of color. In one brutal flashback, he shows a gang of racists raping, torturing and murdering scores of Melungeons. Elsewhere, we see the subtler, more or less legal ways the poor are kept in their place by laws, deeds and contracts.

While I was reading this book, I went to the Kennedy Center and saw the trumpeter Terence Blanchard perform the music he composed for "When the Levees Broke," Spike Lee's documentary on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. It was clear that Blanchard was pouring his soul into music that meant everything to him. I think it's easier to approach perfection in music than in fiction, and "Chillwater Cove" is far from a perfect novel, but Lakeman is also trying, with some passion, to speak the truth about a region that arouses his love, his anger and his sorrow.