The Big FinishBy James W. HallMinotaur, 2014The Life We BuryBy Allen EskensSeventh Street Books, Trade Paperback, 2014James W. Hall's haunting first novel, Under Cover of Daylight (1987), introduced his rugged antihero, Thorn. The Big Finish is the 14th novel to feature this fascinating, hard-ass maverick whose Spartan lifestyle caused one girlfriend to dub him “The Gandhi of Key Largo.” He makes his home along the Florida coast in a clapboard-sided house built by his adoptive father. He ties custom bonefish flies for a living. But make no mistake, those flies are in a class by themselves.What he does, he does better than anyone else in the Keys:

All of his two dozen regular customers could tie their own flies, often bringing one by so Thorn could admire. But Thorn could do something else, some bright tiny nightmare magic he could bring to that chenille, that pipe-cleaner body, the flourish of rabbit fur or cat. His flies caught fish. And not one of them looked like anything real.Let it drift down into the murky dull mud of a saltwater flat, down into the drab world of bonefish, that little wedge of clear epoxy with bead-chain eyes and a flare of calf tail, and drag that fantasy through the silt anywhere in the peripheral sight of a bone and it’d smack that thing and run that zinging line to Biimini. …Far as Thorn could tell, it was a kind of voodoo.

Thorn isn’t a P.I., although he does, more often than he’d like, take money to “look into” things. From the beginning, he reminded me of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, although Thorn first appeared the year after McDonald died. Introduced in The Deep Blue Goodbye (1964), McGee is a knight errant who is honorable, sensual, skillful and tough. He risks his life for his clients, all while struggling to adhere to a personal code of moral behavior.Actually, Thorn has a darker personality and past than McGee. But he’s as much of an avenger as Trav. Or as Hall describes him, “I based Thorn on equal parts Travis McGee, Robert Parker’s Spenser, Henry David Thoreau, Elmore Leonard’s usual strong silent hero, and my next door neighbor in Key Largo. I wanted someone who was funny and three dimensional and tough. I wanted him to have a past and be something of a brooder.”The Big Finish begins a year after the cataclysmic events of Going Dark (2013).In that tautly wound, intense novel, Thorn’s mission is to save his newfound son, Flynn Moss, without helping to bring about a South Florida version of Chernobyl. As one critic put it: “Thorn meets the nuclear option.” Grit, stamina and sheer luck pulls Flynn from the brink of disaster in a hair-raising climax which ends with his disappearing once more into the eco-underground as a full-fledged member of ELF (Earth Liberation Front)—or what Thorn calls “a band of environmental crazies.”Since then there’ve been seven picture postcards from Flynn. The postcards have been arriving regularly at his friend Sugarman’s office. Sugar, Thorn’s closest friend, is a private eye who is Thorn’s opposite. He is cool, controlled, methodical and steady. He’s saved the impulsive Thorn’s ass more times than either man cared to recall. Thorn usually defers to his sound judgment but since these postcards started arriving the men have been at odds over what they signified:

“He’s sending you a message,” Sugar said.“A few words would be a message. These are blank. This feels moreLike taunting…”“He wants you to know where he is, that he’s safe.”“Then he should include his goddamn address.”“You know he can’t do that. He’s got to stay at arm’s length.”“Why send them to your office? Not directly to me?”“Somebody could be snooping on your mail.”“Come on. Who would do that?”“Whatever federal task force is hunting ecoterrorists.”“Flynn’s no terrorist.”Sugar didn’t reply.

More to the point, each card is related to an environmental issue:

With a little research on each location Thorn found the same pattern repeating each time. An environmental outrage committed against a community, followed by some kind of violent attack in response, each one an attempt to solve the issue or at least bring it to the public’s attention….

Each attack is carefully calibrated to cause harm to property without loss of life. Then they vanished.As the novel opens Sugar has a new postcard. This one has no issue and on the messageside there are two words—Help Me—hand printed in all caps like the address. Plus, the card is stamped but there’s no postmark. Curious and scary.What the card does have is a caption: The Neuse River, Pine Haven, North Carolina. And what they do know is that Flynn’s in trouble. Faster than the proverbial speeding bullet, Thorn and Sugarman are in a car heading for the small Carolina town where it turns out Flynn’s group was attempting to close a toxic pig farm. But the pig farmer and his cronies came at them full force in a shooting rampage that kills most of the group. Flynn’s body is among the missing!A series of unforeseen complications causes Sugarman to return to Key Largo. Thorn’s lone pursuit of his son’s path becomes an agonizing obstacle course. Everyone he encounters gives him mixed messages about Flynn’s fate. There is a rogue FBI agent with her own nutty agenda and a crazed vegan (for me, that’s an oxymoron) whose weapon is raw meat (gross is an understatement). His equilibrium is ambushed and his mind is blown by a hallucinatory drug force fed to him by some incredibly evil thugs. For the first time in his life, “He feels the squeaky wheels of the winged chariot gaining on him.”The ending is bittersweet, a double-edged sword. True to form, Hall’s ingenious plot twists are intimately intertwined with Florida’s intricate ecology and vanishing beauty. He rails at the wanton ways that the Everglades have been ravaged without missing a beat in the story line. He’s an arcane Carl Hiaasen.The Big Finish is vintage Hall. He’s a painter with words. He’s a poet who can evoke the horrific with a lyric voice. Not to be missed – and that’s an order.The world of University of Minnesota freshman Joe Talbert, the hero of Allen Esken’s The Life We Bury, couldn’t be more removed from Thorn’s. It opens hauntingly with Talbert’s voice:

I remember being pestered by a sense of dread as I walked to my car that day, pressed down by a wave of foreboding that swirled around my head and broke against the evening in small ripples. There are people in this world who would call that kind of feeling a premonition, a warning from some internal third eye that we can see around the curve of time. I’ve never been one to buy into such things. But I will confess that there have been times when I think back to that day and wonder if the fates had truly whispered in my ear—if I had known how that drive would change so many things—would I have taken a safer path? Or would I still travel the path that led me to Carl Iverson?

That path begins when Joe visits a nursing home in search of a subject for his English assignment—interview and write a brief biography of a stranger. The choice of the home, a desperate one born of a looming deadline, turns out to be inspired. There he meets Carl Iverson, one of the only patients not affected by dementia.Carl was convicted decades earlier of the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl. Now he’s on medical parole after serving 30 years of a life sentence because he is dying of pancreatic cancer. He agrees to tell Joe his story. It is a story full of surprises, not the least of which is that Carl served with valor in Vietnam. Soon nothing about the man Joe is getting to know reconciles with the despicable act of the convict. He sets out to prove Carl’s innocence, aided and abetted by Lila Nash, his attractive, highly strung neighbor, who has her own troubled past.Meanwhile, Joe must deal with an alcoholic mother who is so dangerously dysfunctional she cannot care for his autistic brother. Joe is faced with possibly sacrificing his education to protect his very vulnerable brother. The delicate relationship between the brothers, and their special interaction with Lila, is drawn with consummate skill—as is a Vietnam buddy of Carl’s who plays a pivotal role.The tension builds as Joe is drawn deeper into Carl’s case. He uncovers secrets that disclose as much about him as about Carl. A shocking revelation leads to a no-holds-barred finale you won’t soon forget.This is a multilayered mystery that works on every level. Eskens is definitely a comer.____Irma Heldman s a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.