THE HANGMAN’S KNOT

Revisiting a 50-year-old lynching in America’s heartland provides former tough guy Wiltse with his kindest, gentlest outing yet.

Having left the Secret Service detail guarding the vice president to live the good life in his hometown of Falls City, Nebraska, Billy Tree is doing his level best to fit in with the locals after his traumatic debut (Heartland, 2001). He’s serving as deputy Bert Lapolla, the inoffensive Acting Sheriff of Richardson County; he’s carrying on a discreet romance with his old high-school flame, widowed nurse Joan Blanchard, which isn’t bothering anybody but young Will Blanchard, who blames Billy for his father’s death and would love to see him just as dead; and he’s bonding with the relatives he left behind, from his helpful sister Kath to his sozzled uncle Sean. But Odette Collins, whose rabid dog Billy got Lapolla to shoot, just won’t leave him alone. He checks into a local motel registering as Wilson Picket and Otis Redding, tags along trying to provoke confrontations, and makes Billy wonder just what a black man is doing among the cornfields of Nebraska anyway. One possible explanation is suggested by a miniature hangman’s noose some anonymous donor has left for Billy—a noose that ties Billy and his family to Judge Lyle Sunder. The trail into the past leads to the 1948 lynching in nearby Kansas of Lawton Mills, accused of a sex murder and sentenced to summary justice by a jury of every peer in town. Reopening the case makes Billy queasy—but not nearly as queasy as the sight of Odette Collins ducking out of sight behind Joan Blanchard’s house, or the angry resistance to questioning that makes Joan just as hostile as her resentful son.

A proficient, synthetic spin on the long-hidden-secrets formula, the most routine of Wiltse’s dozen thrillers to date. It would be nice to think that he’s mellowing along with his heroes.