Our book today is a lean, moody debut mystery novel, Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman, and it’s the latest in an ominously popular new sub-sub-genre, “rural noir”: dark and sordid murder-and-violence plot lines taking place not in far-flung exotic locales but rather just forty miles off the interstate, in the most depressed parts of the poorest states in the richest country in the world. On the macro level, few literary developments could more chillingly reflect the widening income gap than this whole strand of fiction, but in the micro level, there’s no denying how enjoyable a lot of these books are. Earlier this year we say Christopher Scotton’s The Secret Wisdom of the Earth, featuring, among other things, violence and reprisals in the Appalachians, and Tom Bouman’s book takes us back to the Appalachians, this time to the forgotten hills and woods of rural Pennsylvania, to Wild Thyme Township in Holebrook County, which our narrator Officer Henry Farrell describes with his signature Big-Picture sarcasm:

Holebrook County is on the western edge of the Endless Mountain region. The term is a poetic one; what people mean is that it’s hilly. We’re part of the Appalachian Range, which formed almost five hundred million years ago, along with a vast inland sea to the west. Creatures in the sea died and sank, and the mountains eroded, and over a hundred million years this mix of sediment and organic matter was buried and turned into shale, the Marcellus Shale. Because of the once-living things in it, the Marcellus contains a lot of natural gas, all wrapped up in layers of rock like a present to America.

The county is changing in rapid convulsions: the “gas boom” is making sudden millionaires out of people Farrell grew up with dirt poor and happy before he struck out on his own, saw military service, and finally returned to take a job most of his constituent aren’t even sure should exist (“Why does a small rural community need not one but two law enforcement officers?” … Why should we pay taxes for a service we don’t want, when there’s a state police barracks nearby?”). The picture of country simplicity has been supplanted by fly-by-night meth labs, duplicitous government agents, and a scattered populace with a lot to hide.

A mutilated body turns up on the property of a bitter, angry old man, and Officer Farrell hasn’t been investigating it very long when a second dead body is found. Bouman unfolds his suspect-upon-suspect story with an ease that’s surprising for a first novel, but his real strength is in capturing both the furtive atmosphere and the strung-out beauty of the Pennsylvania mountains – a not entirely surprising strength, since Bouman grew up in those hills and has said in interviews that he and his family have recently returned to live there. That’s certainly what I call suffering for your art, but if it makes the rest of the books in this series as entertaining as the first one, that’s very good news.