NIGHT OF THE ICE STORM

Who was it who objected so violently to a homosexual pass thrown by Fr. John Barrow that he embedded a five iron in the priest's head? Twenty years after the 1971 murder, no one in the Upstate New York town of Bessemer much cares—until some newshounds stumble upon the nearly forgotten killing, just as one did in Stout's far more resonant (and Edgar-winning) first mystery, Carolina Skeletons (1988; followed by the vivid but predictable thriller Hell Gate, 1990). Marlee West, 40-ish feminist columnist for the local Gazette, and Jenifer Hurley, the paper's hotshot young investigative reporter, reopen the case when a sleazy colleague is found shot to death—suicide or murder?—while rooting around in files relating to the murder, and to an upcoming reunion of Gazette employees past and present, including two prime suspects: Gazette editor Will Shafer, who's suppressing memory of some terrible guilt, and true-crime copy- editor Grant Siebert, who escaped from Bessemer to Manhattan shortly after the murder. Amidst sensitively drawn but pace-slowing scenes of small- time newspaper life, Stout points at his two suspects with such a heavy hand that the ending is no surprise. Rather, it is an embarrassment, a sorry end to a humdrum affair as the revealed killer reverts to infantilism, whining, ``He was a mean priest. He wanted me to touch him...down there! He did!''-capping Stout's weakest novel to date.