TWISTED TREE

Dark portrait of a High Plains community.

Serial killer traps latest victim! There’s no resisting the power of the opening chapter, told from the viewpoint of the so-called I-90 killer. He’s been visiting pro-Ana Web sites to target anorexic young women. Now he’s closing in on Hayley Jo Zimmerman, a sales clerk in Rapid City, S.D., originally from the small town of Twisted Tree. Posing on the site as an older woman, he’s learned all Hayley Jo’s secrets. They meet face-to-face and he lures her into his Continental before she realizes his identity. Readers hoping for more white-knuckle suspense will be disappointed, for Meyers (The Work of Wolves, 2004, etc.) then shifts gears to begin a ruminative study of Twisted Tree residents, many of whom had contact with Hayley Jo. The author spins a web of relationships, scatters what-ifs and sounds the themes of guilt and innocence. This is a landscape soaked in blood. The first white settler, Old Joe Valen, forced Native Americans off their land, then shot dead one of their number fleeing Wounded Knee. We meet their descendants. Eddie Little Feather, drunk in the road, will be decapitated by a tractor trailer. The last of the Valens, Shane, is a creepy poacher who sleeps among animals. Meyers’ prose is strikingly physical, sometimes thrillingly so: driving on the highway, Angela Morrison realizes there’s a rattlesnake nestling at her feet. But occasionally he wanders into gothic territory; there are entirely too many rattlers attending the gruesome deaths of Shane and his mother. Throughout, the bell tolls for Hayley Jo. What if friends had intervened over her anorexia? The questions linger as we delve into other lives. Sometimes connections seem forced, yet Meyers brings everything into alignment for his epilogue, in which a group of Native Americans conduct an offbeat, good-humored exorcism involving the killer’s Continental.

Terrific opening, terrific close, but a bumpy ride in between.