Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have had this novel on my to read list since shortly after it was published. I went to a "Northern Irish Noir" panel at the local library featuring crime-writers Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville and Steve Cavanagh and, from memory, at least two of them were reading it. I'm glad I finally got round to it.

An atmospheric slice of rural noir, 'Dry Bones in the Valley' is set in a Pennsylvania community full of simmering tensions and interfamily suspicions. Officer Henry Farrell, a melancholy widower, following the discovery of an unidentified corpse on the land of a reclusive neighbour, is drawn into an investigation hampered by these long held resentments and feuds, many brought into sharp focus due to the potential windfalls offered by a fracking company to the otherwise extremely poor landowners.

The key to the book is the atmosphere and sense of place, the cold sparse backwoods and Tom Bouman, in his first novel, proves an immediate master of suspense with several tense nighttime confrontations. His observations on the plight of the American poor - "Poor people aren’t thin anymore, like when I was a kid; now they’re fat on the cheap food feeding the ghost of the American dream." - are well-constructed and thought-provoking, some hoping that the natural gas that lies in the shale below their dwellings will be their salvation, others dealing drugs.

I liked Henry Farrell - he's no barrel of laughs but he is a compelling and authentic voice. I was drawn in by the descriptions of dark woodland and bogs, possibly due to the similarity with rural Ireland, and I look forward to revisiting when Bouman's second Farrell book is published later this year. I suspect, as I suspect does Farrell, that the fracking bonanza may not be the positive change some of his neighbours are anticipating.

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