Violence blows through broken lives

Carolyn D. Wall's "Sweeping Up Glass" opens with a sustained wolf's howl and gunshots. It's 1938 and Olivia, a widow raising her young grandson Will'm, knows hunters are trespassing, shooting wolves that have lived peaceably for 65 years on her spread on the side of a Kentucky mountain. She and Will'm slog out through deep snow and find two male wolves dead and a female dying, all with their ears taken as hunting trophies. A week earlier, Olivia found another wolf shot and disfigured in the same way. She recognizes this ominous, not-so-veiled threat to her and her family.

Will'm begs her to take the still-breathing she-wolf home. Later, she muses, "I have a crazy [mother] who owns a hundred dusty bibles, a leggy boy with a too-soft heart, and no man to bed down with. And an Alaskan Silver dying on my kitchen floor."

A chapters-long flashback that follows reveals Olivia's past, beginning before her birth when her mother tried to abort her. Olivia's youth is a hardscrabble life, made bearable by a nurturing father who runs the general store, bootlegs liquor, and heals injured and sick animals. Oblivious to the "whites only" sign on the store's door, Olivia considers their black neighbors her best friends and the closest she has to extended family.

Her life turns to gothic horror after a car accident kills her father, maims Olivia, and leaves her marooned with her crazy mother.

This extraordinary debut novel, both a "what happened" and a "whodunit," explores survival and the guilt that can accompany it. The writing is filled with arresting images, bitter humor, and characters with palpable physical presence. The fresh voice of that clear-eyed narrator reminded me of Scout in Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird." I literally could not put it down.

Michael Koryta's "Envy the Night" features another gorgeous rural setting - the lakes surrounding Tomahawk, Wis. - and another tortured protagonist whom readers won't soon forget. Frank Temple III inherited his name from his war-hero grandfather and his less heroic father, a professional hit man who "found a coward's way to avoid a life sentence."

When Frank gets a call from his father's buddy Ezra Ballard telling him that his father's nemesis, Devin Matteson, is out of jail and on his way back to his island cottage near Tomahawk, Frank vows to get there first and kill him. But first, he gets roaring drunk. "Officer, I'd like to report a missing pair of pants," he says to the cop who arrests him.

After an overnight in a detox cell, Frank packs up his meager belongings and drives north. He's almost reached Tomahawk when he rear-ends a Lexus driven by a twitchy, nervous guy who wants to take care of the damage with cash, no questions asked, even though he's not at fault. The tow truck that shows up is driven by Nora Stafford. Like Frank, she's one of the walking wounded, her life derailed since her father, who owns a body shop, suffered a disabling stroke. Of course, it turns out that the Lexus owner has a connection to Matteson, and soon Frank, Nora, and Ezra are in grave danger that none of them fully understands.

Gallows humor leavens this heart-pounding thriller, which stakes Frank's cunning and prowess, learned at his father's knee, against a chilling array of thugs and an FBI agent bent on charging him with attempted murder. Take yourself to an island, pull up an Adirondack chair, and scare yourself silly with this one.

Two men are beaten and hanged from a Long Island railroad bridge, close by a building that was once headquarters to the Castello crime family in the opening of Daniel Judson's "The Water's Edge." The victims turn out to be drug couriers.

The police chief strong-arms former PI Tommy Miller into mounting an unofficial investigation into whether the Castellos killed their own. Miller's father was the police chief's corrupt predecessor, and was killed by hired gunmen.

Meanwhile, the Castellos pick up Jake "Payday" Bechet and coerce him into investigating the murders, which may have been pulled off by a traitorous insider. Bechet, a former prizefighter, was once an enforcer for the Castellos and now lives off the grid, running a cab company.

The journeys of two flawed heroes, each with his own moral compass, converge. So far so good. But too much narration and a surfeit of viewpoints capsize this overlong novel. Each time a new character appears, paragraphs of description and pages of back story bring forward momentum to a halt. From multiple viewpoints we get the same information again, and again, and again. Narrators repeatedly withhold key facts. For instance, well into the novel, Bechet makes a call; after three rings, he hears "a voice [he] hadn't heard for a long while." Bechet knows who it is, but it's quite a few more pages before the reader finds out. Maybe this technique is supposed to create suspense. It doesn't. It only reminds the reader that a writer is pulling strings.

Hallie Ephron is author of "1001 Books for Every Mood." Contact her through www.hallieephron.com.