Thomas Cobb had the good fortune to have his critically well-regarded 1987 first novel, Crazy Heart, made into an Academy Award-winning film. This kind of good fortune is tough to follow. Other than two historical westerns and a story collection, he hasn't published any fiction since. Darkness the Color of Snow suggests that this hiatus was worth it. Like much of Richard Russo's work, Cobb's novel takes place in a small town in upstate New York near the Vermont border. When rookie patrolman Ronny Forbert stops a speeding Jeep with former schoolmates looped on beer and weed, tempers get out of hand and old jealousies lead to a scuffle that accidently puts the driver, Matt Laferiere, in the path of another car sliding on the dangerous icy highway. Laferiere is killed and the other car takes off. This relatively unambiguous hit-and-run case turns into a local political battlefield as the influential parents of the guys in the Jeep lawyer up and go after Ronny and Chief Gordy Hawkins.
Set in the dead of a snowy winter, Darkness the Color of Snow is a story of a dying region's fragility, with its textile mill jobs gone overseas and little left behind but booze, guns and big trucks. As Gordy reflects on the death and divisiveness that descend on his town, "the human body is a frail thing in a world of things that are strong, fast, and very unfrail." Quietly and compassionately, Cobb captures the subtle way seemingly random events can upend the lives of a whole town. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.