Pun Salad

I placed this book on my get-at-library list thanks to the WSJ reviewer, Tom Nolan, deeming it one of 2025's best mysteries (WSJ gifted link). And, yes, it's not a particularly pleasant read, but the author, Bruce Currie, makes it seriously powerful. Two of the back-cover blurbers compare Currie to Dennis Lehane; I get that. And I might toss in some Carl Hiaasen, too, if more of Hiaasen's characters were psychologically haunted substance abusers.

Babs Dionne is the central figure around which the Franco-American community in Waterville, Maine, revolves. We are introduced to her as the ancestor of Acadian driftwood, with a long history of maltreatment and oppression by the privileged in Canada and Maine. And in a chilling prologue based in 1968, she murders her rapist, then goes seeking … something … from city's new Catholic priest, Father Clement.

Then we jump ahead to 2016, and Babs has become the widowed matriarch of Waterville's illicit drug trade: pot, meth, oxy, heroin, step right up. She's in sordid league with the town's police chief. And has two surviving offspring: oxy-inhaling Lori, ex-Marine, back from a hellacious tour in Afghanistan, and crack-addicted "Sis". Who (page 29 spoiler) becomes a murder victim, left in her burning Subaru at a local junkyard. Worse, an oddball drug kingpin from Canada and his henchmen want to take over the Waterville drug trade, and they have no problem with killing, if that makes their goal easier to accomplish.

Oh, and Lori has a habit of seeing dead people, just like Dave Robicheaux.

So, it's the polar opposite of (say) Nita Prose's "Maid" novels. Be warned, or encouraged. I, for one, consider myself lucky that Waterville is at a respectably safe distance from Rollinsford, New Hampshire.