LEAD, SO I CAN FOLLOW

Just because Carl Wilcox is married doesn’t mean he’s decided to settle down. For one thing, the itinerant sign-painter and his librarian bride Hazel (No Badge, No Gun, 1998) are honeymooning in true Depression-era style, camping out on the shores of Minnesota’s St. Croix River. For another, their idyll is shattered by the sounds of a gunshot and a scream that send both of them springing out of their sleeping bags just in time for Carl to pull a body that’s gone over a nearby cliff from the railroad tracks right before an oncoming train would have made identification a crapshoot. When the doctor from local Indeville announces that Francis Linklater doesn’t have any bullet wounds, Carl wonders how he died—and how his death is connected to the suspicious suicide of failed farmer Nate Pryke earlier that year. The obvious connections are Nate’s merry widow Carmen, who’s rumored to have scattered her favors broadcast, and neighboring siren Kat Bacon, who seems to have led on every member of Link’s band. But since Carl can’t see any of the young people as a killer, his compass flutters wildly from one improbable suspect to the next before finally coming to rest on the most unlikely one of all. Adams’s 1930s American Gothic is as gauntly effective as ever, and Carl’s bride makes a charming sidekick, but their nuptial case is no more than a tangle of loose ends.