STOLEN HONEY

It’s always risky for a farm girl to venture into a frat party, but half-Abenaki Donna Woodleaf gets punished beyond all reason. Shep Noble, the fast-talking baseball captain who takes her home, tries to rape her; next morning he’s found dead in a patch of the medicinal belladonna her beekeeper mother grows; and everybody at Branbury College seems to think it’s her fault—especially the anonymous correspondent who torments her with notes like “SQUAWS DIE” and “HANG THE WITCH.” The real action, however, is elsewhere, in sociology professor Camilla Wimmet’s research into the Godineaux family, branded a century ago as degenerate by eugenicist William Perkey’s meddlesome wife Eleanor and forced to undergo sterilization, though not soon enough to prevent three generations of variously damaged offspring from fanning out over the Vermont countryside. Camilla’s attempts to find out what’s become of Annette Godineaux’s descendants are opposed by everybody from the family members she manages to track down to the intruder who wipes her computer clean and chokes her to death. But Ruth Willmarth, whose daughter Emily is Camilla’s student and Donna’s friend, and whose dairy-farm helper Joey is Annette Godineaux’s great-grandson, never drops a stitch as she improbably follows the search into a thicket more densely planted than any cloud of belladonna.

Ruth’s fourth (Poison Apples, 2000, etc.) is as penetrating, economical, and generously plotted as her first three, though readers less clever than Ruth may need a road map through the undergrowth of suspects and subplots.