BLACK VALLEY
Jim Brown
Ballantine
Fiction
ISBN: 0345446992

There are for readers few pleasures that surpass picking up a novel and having one's expectations, however high they may be, simultaneously exceeded and turned upside down. 2003 has been a good year for such an experience, what with SMALL TOWN by Lawrence Block and SHUTTER ISLAND by Dennis Lehane, among others. It is, however, an unexpected and welcome event to have a writer accomplish such a feat with a sophomore effort. This is precisely what Jim Brown has done with BLACK VALLEY.

BLACK VALLEY opens with what could be called a "locked coffin" mystery --- what else do you call it when you lock someone in a coffin, bury them, unearth the coffin a few hours later and find it empty? The story then picks up 22 years later, as things in Black Valley, Oregon begin to rapidly and inexplicably reach FUBAR status. The action seems to gradually center on five people: John Evans, the town sheriff; Nathan Perkins, the mayor; Clyde Watkins, the area's congressman; Mason Evans, the founder of a successful construction company and John's cousin; and Dean Truman, self-effacing genius, Nobel-prize winner, and professor at the local college. The five were boyhood friends, and all except Truman were involved 22 years before in the prank burial of a dangerous misfit named Whitey Dobbs, a burial that went suddenly and horribly wrong.

Now Whitey Dobbs, missing from the casket and Black Valley for 22 years, suddenly reappears, as inexplicable events begin to occur in and around the town. Truman holds to his core belief that there are no phenomena that cannot be explained scientifically. His belief is shaken, however, when occurrences in and around the town become more mysterious, and more and more deadly. Truman slowly realizes that he may hold the key not only to the reappearance of Dobbs, but also to the deadly events that are occurring --- and that he may well be responsible for them. And the key to everything may partly lie in the secret that Truman has kept for decades, the secret that has prevented him from leaving BLACK VALLEY.

BLACK VALLEY is a genre-blurring book, mixing equal parts suspense, mystery, horror, and a few other things as well, to create a novel that from beginning to end is impossible to predict or anticipate and that surprises from first page to last. Brown, who created the expectation of more great things with 24/7, his first novel, meets that expectation and surpasses it. There is no doubt he will continue to do so: books as good as BLACK VALLEY don't come along by accident. Highly recommended.

   --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

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