White Crosses

This is no tale bred from the misguided nostalgia for an older, rural West, although it is set in the presumably less complicated 1950s; rather, it's a tale of moral manipulation and a bone-deep resignation that leads people to come unhinged. Jack Nevelson, the sheriff of Bentrock, Montana, knows his town. His business, as he's come to define it, is to fit everything under the rubric of his stewardship. Nevelson receives a fateful call on the evening after Bentrock High School's graduation, leading him to the site of a tragic accident; there he discovers the bodies of two people who had no business being together in life, let alone death: the principal of the elementary school and a teenage girl, June Moss. Nevelson uncovers three packed suitcases in the wreckage of the accident. Were the two running off together? Nevelson decides to squelch the truth in favor of a less damning story in order to protect his town. But the lie creates a whole new set of problems for the sheriff and the people of Bentrock.

Thus unfolds a small-town saga of lives crippled by slender means--spiritual and material--and the desperation born of dead-end lives. Larry Watson's White Crosses is an ideal read for those who love the rich body of literature the West has produced, that which grapples with timely problems, both dwarfed and defined by the inimitable spaces, the uncultivable arid beauty, the pinched options, and the infinity of stars.