Synopsis
In Don Bredes’s Cold Comfort, Hector Bellevance left Vermont for Harvard, graduated into a job with the Boston Police Department, made detective, married, divorced, accidentally shot his partner during a raid gone bad, and then returned to Vermont because, as Robert Frost famously said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Now, in The Fifth Season, he’s back in the town of Tipton, growing vegetables for the farmer’s market, dating Wilma Strong, the hotshot reporter for the local paper, and serving as town constable, when Marcel Boisvert—a contrary town father who, as road commissioner, maintains Tipton’s rural thoroughfares—apparently goes berserk. Hector finds the county sheriff shot dead in Marcel’s dooryard and the Tipton town clerk shot dead in her office. Marcel has disappeared.
Hector and Wilma and half of the Vermont State Police are looking for Marcel—and looking over their shoulders at the same time. The small town’s history, the complex interrelationships of people whose fathers and grandfathers were friends, and the outlaw independence of such a place all play into a tale of love, betrayal, and one very strange season.
Publishers Weekly
The idea of the big city cop who accidentally kills his partner and then shakes up his life by going back to his rural hometown receives fresh treatment in Bredes's suspense series featuring Hector Bellevance, a Harvard graduate who was a detective in the Boston police department before tragedy overtook him. In Bellevance's poignant second outing (after 2001's Cold Comfort), the author deepens an already original character, who has returned home to Tipton, Vt., where he works as town constable, grows vegetables for tourists and dates local reporter Wilma Strong. When Marcel Boisvert, a Tipton power broker, apparently goes berserk and murders two public officials, Bellevance and Wilma find all sorts of local secrets under various Vermont rocks. Though the novel is based on an actual 1997 case, Bredes manages to add a sizable amount of fictional flourish with impressive results. Agent, Howard Morhaim. (May 3) FYI: A Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Bredes is a contributor to such journals as the Paris Review and the New York Times Magazine. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.