WALKING THROUGH SHADOWS

Newcomer Marshall attempts to pull heartstrings while creating suspense in this murder mystery set in rural 1941 Mississippi.

Since Lloyd Cotton’s wife Rowena convinced him to hire Sheila Barnes two years earlier to save the girl from an abusive father, Sheila has proven a hard worker on Lloyd’s dairy farm. Despite being uneducated and, according to Rowena, slow (although the only evidence is unquenchable optimism despite continual mistreatment), she offers spiritual wisdom the supposedly intelligent Cottons take seriously. Waiflike and mildly deformed, she also exudes an animal magnetism that affects every male she encounters. One morning 17-year-old Sheila turns up missing, When her battered, pregnant body is found in a nearby field, the police line up their suspects: Sheila’s demented father, her handsome but dimwitted husband Stoney, and Lloyd himself. Marshall approaches and re-approaches Sheila’s story, Rashomon-style, through five narrators. Lloyd’s 11-year-old daughter Amanda, who considers Sheila her best friend, recounts Sheila’s life at the dairy with an innocence undercut by confused guilt over her own attraction to Stoney and her pubescent need for independence from her doting parents. Genteel Rowena’s version is colored by her difficult, unexpected pregnancy and long-repressed anger over Lloyd’s infidelity years before. When the old affair becomes a public scandal, suspicion lands on Lloyd and rocks his marriage. In his narration, Lloyd acknowledges his inappropriate, unspoken attraction to Sheila and his powerlessness in the face of the scandal. We also hear from Stoney, whose passion for Sheila is both childlike and violent, and from a newspaper reporter who, while unraveling the case, finds himself attracted to the wife of Stoney’s older, handsomer, and more vicious brother. Sheila remains a victim cliché despite (or because of) Marshall’s attempt to make her a symbol of desecrated innocence. No one will be shocked to learn who impregnated or killed her.

Predictable southern gothic, but the modulated scrutiny of the Cotton marriage is memorable.