THE PAUPER FIELD

A washed-up lawyer stumbles upon a missing persons case in Jackson’s debut thriller.

Jacksonville, Oregon, seemed like the perfect place for Braxton Hayward to drink away his misery (he’s suffering from a failed marriage, a ruined law career, and bankruptcy) and try his hand at writing. In the weeks since he moved to the small, rustic town, however, he’s been haunted by hallucinations: An unseen voice repeats the mysterious phrase, “In Terra Lios,” and a group of ghostly bodies hangs suspended from the branches of a tree. Braxton tries to brush them off as drunken dreams, but things start to feel a lot more real when a family of three—the local art gallery owner Elle Harris, her police officer fiancé, and young son—abruptly disappears from town. As law enforcement and the media descend on the area to search for the missing trio, Braxton, who met Elle recently and once dreamed of joining the FBI, can’t help but get invested in the case…especially after bumping into the very attractive FBI agent Riley McAvoy, who has come down from Portland to work it. Elle’s 3-year-old son soon turns up alive, but not his parents. What’s more, a second couple goes missing as well. His lawyerly intuition reawakened, Braxton digs into the mystery, which seems to involve a long-standing rivalry between two prominent families in Jacksonville. The question is, are Elle and her fiancé dead, or have they simply run away? And if they have run away, what are they running from? As Braxton discovers unusual connections between himself and some of the major players, he may have to turn the question back on himself: What exactly is Braxton running from? And can learning the fate of Elle Harris help him to face it?

Jackson’s understated but fluid prose pulls the reader along with Braxton into the shifting center of the case. “Inside, the atmosphere was abuzz,” he notices, striding into the town’s bar the morning after the disappearances. “People huddled around the wooden tables, their conversations a mix of speculation and concern. Braxton caught fragments as he navigated his way to an open stool: ‘Could it be something sinister?’ ‘What if they just ran off together?’ ‘She seemed so grounded.’” Braxton is a slightly unsympathetic protagonist, perhaps to a greater degree than the author means for him to be—he’s an alcoholic mostly lacking in charm or humor or even a notably tragic backstory. (His divorce was amicable; his bankruptcy was due to him being forced to cover the legal fees of a school district that beat him in court.) The plot is filled with little unearned coincidences, and none of the supporting characters are terribly complex. Even so, there’s a stickiness to the mystery, and to Braxton’s sincere attraction to it, which retroactively deepens the impact of his initial purposelessness. The setting is richly rendered, charming by daylight but thoroughly sinister in the night. The ending probably precludes further cases following Braxton the lawyer-detective, but readers will be eager to discover what future intrigues Jackson may have up his sleeve.

A flawed but entrancing thriller set in a small-town Oregon.