THE CIVIL WARS OF JONAH MORAN

A young woman fights to defend her disabled brother against charges of arson—and finds the past intruding in bittersweet ways as her first love comes back into her life and she learns the truth about her long-dead father. This time out, the Washington-based Reynolds (The Starlite Drive-in, 1997) sets her story in a logging town on the Olympic Peninsula. Not only about love, romance, and family, the narrative also sympathetically examines the uneasy relations between the local whites and the Native Americans of a nearby reservation. Jessica Moran, now in her mid-30s, has returned home after leaving as a teenager to live in California. She’s not ready to forgive her mother, Lila, the local mill-owner, for her father’s death 19 years ago. She does want, however, to help her younger brother, Jonah, who has always had a condition similar to autism. Although Jonah doesn—t relate well to people, he’s an expert on the Civil War, whose battles he endlessly reenacts with miniature soldiers. When a suspicious fire kills three out of four paroled sex offenders living in a halfway house, the townspeople are not unhappy, but, worse, Jonah is suspect number one. The evidence? A model soldier found on the premises. Callum Luke, a Native American lawyer now working for the government, arrives to investigate. In addition, he’s Jessica’s first love and the father of the daughter she gave up for adoption in California—at her mother’s insistence. As Jessica fights to protect Jonah, she’s harassed by the fire’s lone survivor, a molester. Plus, she clashes with Callum; they later make love, only to quarrel again, when she reveals the daughter’s existence. Eventually the facts about the fire and her father’s drowning bring vindications and reconciliations—and with Callum ready to forgive, Jessica wins some civil wars of her own. Well-done characters in an unevenly paced tale that takes its time but still delivers.