The Rock Hole by Reavis Z. Wortham

Published by Poisoned Pen Press on June 7, 2011

This deftly plotted, fast moving novel is Reavis Wortham's second. His first (a comedy) was published in 1999. I hope he doesn't wait a dozen years to write another thriller. I don't want to wait that long to read it, and read it I will.

The Rock Hole is set in 1964. About half the chapters are written in the third person. The rest are written from the first person perspective of Top, a ten-year-old boy who lives with his grandparents on the Texas side of the Red River, where they have a cotton farm. Top has nightly nightmares about drowning in the river's Rock Hole.

In addition to farming, Top's grandfather, Ned Parker, is a part-time constable, a job that usually involves busting up stills and arresting disorderly drunks. When he's called to a farmer's field where a dog has been tortured and killed (one of a series of similar crimes), he finds an advertisement torn from the local newspaper that makes him wonder whether the animal predator is about to move on to human prey. Ned's investigation becomes muddled when several members of a family are killed and a baby goes missing. Later murders make it apparent that the animal killer's appetite for gruesome death has progressed to human victims, most of whom are related to Ned. Of course, it's inevitable that the killer's path and Top's will eventually cross.

Top spends much of his time with his cousin, an amusingly foul-mouthed girl named Pepper. The chapters that tell the story from Top's point of view capture the horror that a child would experience when encountering the sort of violence that would disturb even the most jaded adult. While all of the characters are well-developed, the reader forms an empathic bond with Top, whose innocence erodes as the story progresses. Wortham balances the growing tension surrounding the killings with atmospheric scenes of rural life (farming and hunting and community gatherings) and the routine of Ned's law enforcement duties as well as a subplot involving Ned's nephew, who takes up with a woman after she separates from her mean-spirited husband, much to the husband's consternation. Comic moments are carefully placed to create respites from the increasing sense of dread (my favorite involves Ned's response to a fire-and-brimstone preacher who accuses Ned's devoutly Christian wife of living a sinful life).

In many respects, The Rock Hole reminded me of another well-conceived thriller: The Bottoms. Like Joe Lansdale's novel, The Rock Hole takes place in Texas, sets up a story involving mutilated bodies, places a child at the story's center, and features a white protagonist who doesn't share the racist tendencies of his neighbors. Ned, a white man married to a Native American, depends on nonwhite labor to pick his cotton but treats every law-abiding member of the community with respect regardless of race. The town is literally divided by railroad tracks, whites living on one side and blacks on the other. Ned's black deputy enforces his own version of the law in the black community as an alternative to the vicious "justice" dispensed by the racist Sheriff, a man Ned despises. The differing attitudes of the characters on questions of race add realism to the story without becoming sanctimonious (even Ned, who pays low wages to the laborers who pick his cotton while worrying that civil rights protests will spread to their community, has a ways to go).

The Rock Hole isn't quite as chilling as The Bottoms, but the quality of the writing is nearly as good. I loved the way it ended.  This is a novel I can entusiastically recommend to thriller fans.

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