Thomas Maltman packs a lot of story, myth and mystery into the southwestern Minnesota setting of Little Wolves. Wrested from its original Indian inhabitants by German immigrants, Lone Mountain ("a pretty enough town at first glance") sits amid vast open prairies where farm families are losing battles with drought and the technology revolution of the 1980s. One Saturday afternoon, the well-liked sheriff is shot in the face with a sawed-off shotgun wielded by 17-year-old Seth Fallon. A loner raised by his single father, Grizz, Seth then walks off into a stunted corn field and turns the gun on himself.
Maltman (winner of the 2008 Spur award for The Night Birds) knows small-town prairie people and the secrets that underlie a community life of high school football games and church pageants. Part crime novel and part social realism, Little Wolves focuses not only on the troubled relationship between Seth and Grizz, but also on Seth's attachment to Clara Warren, the pregnant young pastor's wife who is his substitute English teacher. A Beowulf scholar, she forms a bond with Seth that both encourages and frightens her when he sends her cryptic notes of adoration in runic script and Norse drawings. As the story of Seth's solitary childhood raising abandoned coyote pups and struggling with a distant father merges with that of Clara's marital ambivalence and haunting dreams of a mother she never knew, the motives behind Seth's crime emerge. Saturated with violence, Anglo-Saxon mythology and parochial pettiness, Maltman's novel is an unsettling work of first-rate fiction. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.