WILL-O'-THE-WISP

In Rick and Mike Hobbs’ historical novel, a sacred Indigenous American burial mound serves as a locus of suffering.

In the 1930s, young friends Beau Addington and Willie Stanford go deer hunting on their own in Abbeville, Georgia. After a run-in with an aggressive man in the woods, they wind up lost but thankfully get a helping hand from Sylvie, a Muscogee. Near her cabin is a burial mound that, while considered sacred, had been the site of brutality in the early 19th century. The Muscogee sacrificed children to the mound’s “Great Spirits,” but that changed nothing as the white settlers in the area brought relentless violence and disease (“the Great Spirits were angry. The blood sacrifices had not appeased them”). Beau and Willie’s lives continue: They graduate college and fight in the United States Army during World War II. Back in Abbeville, they make enemies of cousins Ernie, Earl, and Conway Dunphy. This nefarious trio proudly engages in extortion (strong-arming locals with acts of vandalism); carrying a grudge from their school days, they aim their hostility at Beau and Willie and set in motion a kidnapping. Brothers Rick and Mike Hobbs unspool a deliberately paced tale; the Muscogee people’s backstory is so copiously detailed that Beau and Willie don’t appear in the first quarter of the book. (The story eventually centers around the two friends alongside various Abbeville residents.) The narrative includes intriguing nods to historical events including the Creek War of 1836 and Pearl Harbor, the latter of which motivates Beau and Willie to join the Army. The absorbing melodrama offers a few notably dark turns—the conflict between the Muscogee people and the white settlers is quite ferocious, and the Abbeville townspeople’s search for an abducted individual is memorably desperate.

A subdued and gripping character-driven thriller that weaves in real-world history.