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On a single sunny September afternoon in 1862 more than 20,000 men died at the battle of Antietam during the American Civil War. In the face of such carnage, what's one more corpse? In Jim Lehrer's NO CERTAIN REST, Parks Department archeologist Don Spaniel discovers the decaying skeleton of a Civil War soldier; but this soldier doesn't fit the profile of the rest of Antietam's dead. Why is he wearing the identification tags of a soldier who died miles away and months before the battle? Why were his hands tied behind his back? Who took the time and trouble to bury him during one of the goriest battles ever fought on American soil?
These questions haunt Dr. Spaniel, and when he turns up an eyewitness account of a regimental murder, he knows these remains are the end result of a tragic story. As he struggles to put the pieces together, he encounters resistance from the descendants of the troubled Connecticut regiment who brought their hometown resentments into battle with them. There are also the forensic challenges of working with remains nearly 150 years old and the difficulties at Dr. Spaniel's job as the case consumes more and more of his time. What an archeologist working at Antietam might have to do that's more relevant than exhuming new remains from the Civil War is not entirely clear.
Unfortunately for the reader, Dr. Spaniel's conundrum remains largely an intellectual one. None of the characters in the present or the past are developed any further than they absolutely have to be to keep the story moving. The author has a particularly irritating habit of wheeling out experts --- a military historian, a librarian, a forensic anthropologist --- who give Dr. Spaniel the benefits of their expertise and are then dropped from the story as abruptly as they arrived. As it has formed his entire professional career, why isn't Dr. Spaniel an expert on the battle of Antietam? What has he been doing with his time that he has to go to a military historian for basic facts on the battle that purportedly fills his working hours? Perhaps Mr. Lehrer wrote a colorful speech about the gruesome terrors of Antietam and needed a mouth to put it in? The most awkward moments of the book are when the author attempts to include women. I wish he hadn't bothered, for it leaves the reader with lines like, "Romance with Faye Lee Sutton was something to think about later. There was archeology to do first." Dr. Spaniel, unsurprisingly, is a bachelor.
The first two-thirds of the book comprise Dr. Spaniel's search for the man who once fleshed out the skeleton he found. The last third covers his trip to Connecticut to break the unsavory news to the victim's and murderer's descendants. Conveniently enough, they both live in the same town and are quite well versed in their great-grandfathers' Civil War experiences. It's not quite as convenient as a 150-year-old written confession to murder turning up, but that was in the first part of the book. The two present-day Connecticut men, who are living an odd extension of their forebears' rivalry, react bizarrely to the new evidence Dr. Spaniel brings with him, and the book ends on a strange note of new violence.
The information presented in NO CERTAIN REST concerning anthropology, archeology, and the Civil War is quite sound, but there is no realistic emotional aspect to the story and that is a pity. They are fascinating remains, but Mr. Lehrer has not breathed any life into them.
--- Reviewed by Colleen Quinn
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