One Foot in Eden

You might hear this book described as a simple murder mystery – and for the first chapter, you’d be right. However, to the people involved, there’s nothing simple about this murder. Ron Rash tells the story of Holland Winchester, a small-town local layabout just returned from the Korean War. When he disappears, his mother casts suspicion on their neighbours, Billy and Amy Holcombe, insisting that Holland had been sleeping with the wife. But without body, the sheriff can’t charge anyone withmurder.

Told from five points of view – the sheriff and his bloodhound attitude, the wife with her guilty secret, the husband and his pride, the son and his yearning and finally the deputy and his ignorance – Rash builds a complete community, bound together by more than just the land and the times. Each chapter opens another leaf of the mystery, and humanises each character, not allowing their thoughts to be held back in any way, but allowing us to see them as they perceive themselves and the world around them.

Rash gives us a snapshot into what it feels like to be forgotten in the world, or left by the sidelines. Set in a landscape full of ‘dog days’, drought, pain and farming, in the uncertain times of the 1950s, the prose meanders just like the country roads it describes, with every harsh aspect given its rightfulplace. Nods to the past and future allow this world to cover more than a moment in time, and remind us that some things never change: crime, punishment, sadness and the things we do for those we love.

Kate Rockstrom is from Readings Carlton