'Secrets of Eden': Chris Bohjalian's story of secrets in small-town Vermont

'Secrets of Eden'

by Chris Bohjalian

Shaye Areheart Books, 364 pp., $25

The 12th page-turning novel from Chris Bohjalian follows territory familiar to those who know his breakthrough novel "Midwives": a young mother's death in a small Vermont town, an investigation raising troubling questions, a teenage girl trying to make sense of it all. Alice Hayward, the town of Haverill knows, is a battered wife, struggling to find meaning in her life with her brutal husband. The same day that she is baptized by the town's minister, Stephen Drew, she is murdered by her husband, who then turned a gun on himself.

These facts emerge in the book's first dozen pages, and the rest of the novel rotates around the events of that night. Four narrative voices, with varying degrees of directness, tell their versions of the story: the Reverend Drew, who has a not entirely spiritual connection with Alice; state's attorney Catherine Benincasa, concerned that the full story may not yet have been told; self-help author Heather Laurent, a specialist in angels who's haunted by her own parents' murder/suicide; and the Haywards' daughter Katie, a newly orphaned highschooler sorting out the messiness left behind.

Bohjalian has a knack for creating nuanced, detailed first-person female characters (many readers of "Midwives" were surprised to discover its author was male), and Catherine and Heather, in particular, take hold of the book: the no-nonsense, likable lawyer and the earnest woman she calls the Angel Advocate and "a total nut job." Heather writes books with titles like "Angels and Aurascapes," and speaks with a humorless certainty; lines like "I had allowed my mortal judgment to cloud my celestial instincts" flow from her, and we believe them because, well, she does.

Though not much happens in the course of "Secrets of Eden," it speeds along pleasingly as both thriller and character study. And yet, when it's done, you feel just a little empty. Bohjalian is a good writer but not a great one; a skilled storyteller rather than an artist with words. I always enjoy Bohjalian's books but never particularly feel like reading them again, which I suspect will be even more true for "Secrets of Eden," which has a last-minute twist that feels not entirely organic to what came before.

But as always, the feeling of the small Vermont town (Alice's baptism takes place in a neighbor's pond, with the Reverend wearing bluejeans) is comfortably vivid, and Bohjalian takes the reader through potentially upsetting subject matter, such as the violence endured by Alice and young Heather, with tact and insight. These characters seem real, and what happens to them feels like it matters — at least while we're immersed in the book, if not forever.

Moira Macdonald is the movie critic for The Seattle Times.