EVERY HIDDEN THING

True to its title, Flanagan’s debut novel exposes every hidden thing in Worcester, which comes across as the dirty-laundry capital of Massachusetts and maybe the world.

Called to the scene of a premature childbirth, paramedics Thomas Archer and Julio Tavares find that City Hall clerk Daisy Fontana’s  son, Miguel, has already been born with the active but maladroit assistance of ex-cop Eamon Conroy and that the delivery hasn’t gone well. Tavares implores his partner to keep it all quiet. But Archer, who, one of Flanagan’s gratuitously overdetermined flashbacks shows, was largely responsible for getting Conroy kicked off the force and sent to prison before Worcester Mayor John O’Toole, his eye on the governor’s mansion, wangled a pardon for him, files another complaint against Conroy, who retaliates with all the brutality you’d expect of the future governor's fixer. In other news, veteran Courier police reporter Lu McCarthy, Archer’s one-time unofficial stepsister, is downsized but promised a safety net if she files some stories supporting Conroy, and Gerry Knak, a misfit aflame with conspiracy theories stoked by his late wife, takes several steps closer to active membership in the Mount Marne Militia, which his father-in-law, industrial egg farmer Avis Locke, co-founded. As all the players and pawns jockey for position, you may wonder just how all the explosive developments they promise will fit together—until you realize that every single one of them, good guys and bad, is fueled by raging senses of isolation and entitlement, even if they couldn’t agree less just what it is they’re entitled to: wealth, power, security, a peaceful family life, another dawn.

A rich, reeking, ambitious study of an urban jungle that could be Everytown. More, please, without all those flashbacks.