An Affair of Honor
Just as I was thinking it wasn’t my cup of tea, this story pulled me in like quicksand. A WWII hero raised in the mountains of Tennessee and fed the “Code of the Hills” his whole life murders his cheating wife and her lover. The well-planned murder goes astray when it is witnessed up close and personal by a young college student working his way through school at a newspaper. The murderer extracts at gunpoint a promise of silence from the student and then lets him go. The student, of course, crumbles under the lightest of police interrogations. In doing so he launches the small town into a soul-searching quest for the answers, not only in the murder, but also in a myriad of other issues such as honor, segregation, and most notably, the Bible.
Several times I felt that the novel was drawing to a close only to find the author unveiling a new twist and renewing my interest. There are so many personal demons floating around this small 1950s town that it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of them all. I enjoyed every minute of it.
