Saints at the River by Ron Rash

 This novel starts with a heartbreak, and it doesn't get much easier. The people in it are almost all hurting, or soon will be, and Rash draws their suffering through a flame like a silver thread, and he weaves beauty. I was underwhelmed by another of his novels, but I'm glad I gave this novel a chance, it's beautiful and stark and craggy like the Carolina mountains it's set in. What peace or hope emerge are rooted in sorrow and pain, and they feel more precious for it; what answers there are neither simple nor easy. The characters are all well laid out and laid bare, the prose is solid, the ear for dialogue seems spot-on and manages to capture some regionalism without trying to capture dialect--there aren't cute improper words or grammar, here, just some phrasings.

Firewatching by Russ Thomas

 

I read this last night and kinda forgot to post about it. Oops. It's a decent enough procedural, I guess, lots of emphasis on LGBT+ characters and issues, which is fine, but there's some muddle through most of the novel that mostly arises from the decision to have a POV character suffering from pretty severe dementia, which makes her hard to trust ... and then she apparently turns out to have important information--not that "procedural" has all that much in common with "fair play," of course. The characters are often kinda murky, mostly because the author is doing slow reveals, there are really important things that come up kinda late in the novel. There are some dynamics between the characters that feel as though the author might intend or expect to write more novels around them, and he's welcome to but I won't be reading them. This wasn't anything like a good enough novel that I want to read more.