Homecomings, especially long-delayed ones, can be hard. Unresolved emotions and buried secrets sometimes bubble to the surface when the wanderer finally returns. That subject alone would be fitting for the sort of story that's distinguished Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo's long career. But with Under the Falls, he's connected that theme to an engrossing mystery.
Popular singer-songwriter Tyler Sinclair reluctantly is heading back to his hometown 18 years after he left to perform a benefit concert for his childhood friend Doc, paralyzed as a teenager in an accident while diving into the Falls with Tyler's help and now stripped of his Medicaid benefits. But the concert descends into chaos when the audience learns that Doc has died suddenly that evening. Afterward, the limo carrying Tyler is forced off a country road into a ravine by another vehicle. That crash sets the mystery plot into motion.
As the singer slowly recovers from his extensive injuries, his continued presence increases the pressure on Curt--the town's chief of police and another childhood friend of Tyler's who witnessed Doc's diving accident--to unravel the suspicious circumstances of the crash. These events also revive Curt's memories of Tyler's youthful attraction to his wife, Freddi, drawing the net that surrounds these characters ever tighter and forcing a moral reckoning for the man left behind when his best friend fled and achieved celebrity.
Despite the occasional implausibility, Russo (Life and Art) successfully manages the novel's plot twists to maintain the balance between a character-driven story and the tropes of traditional crime novels. Under the Falls will please his longtime readers and undoubtedly attract some new ones. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer