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Summary
Summary
One beautiful summer afternoon, from her bedroom window on the second floor, Jody Linder is unnerved to see her three uncles parking their pickups in front of her parents' house-or what she calls her parents' house, even though Jay and Laurie Jo Linder have been gone almost all of Jody's life. "What is this fearsome thing I see?" the young high school English teacher whispers, mimicking Shakespeare. Polished boots, pressed jeans, fresh white shirts, Stetsons-her uncles' suspiciously clean visiting clothes are a disturbing sign.
The three bring shocking news: The man convicted of murdering Jody's father is being released from prison and returning to the small town of Rose, Kansas. It has been twenty-six years since that stormy night when, as baby Jody lay asleep in her crib, her father was shot and killed and her mother disappeared, presumed dead. Neither the protective embrace of Jody's uncles nor the safe haven of her grandparents' ranch could erase the pain caused by Billy Crosby on that catastrophic night.
Now Billy Crosby has been granted a new trial, thanks in large part to the efforts of his son, Collin, a lawyer who has spent most of his life trying to prove his father's innocence. As Jody lives only a few doors down from the Crosbys, she knows that sooner or later she'll come face-to-face with the man who she believes destroyed her family.
What she doesn't expect are the heated exchanges with Collin. Having grown up practically side by side in this very small town, Jody and Collin have had a long history of carefully avoiding each other's eyes. Now Jody discovers that underneath their antagonism is a shared sense of loss that no one else could possibly understand. As she revisits old wounds, startling revelations compel her to uncover the dangerous truth about her family's tragic past.
Engrossing, lyrical, and suspenseful, The Scent of Rain and Lightning captures the essence of small-town America-its heartfelt intimacy and its darkest secrets-where through struggle and hardship people still dare to hope for a better future. For Jody Linder, maybe even love.
From the Hardcover edition.
Author Notes
Nancy Pickard is best known for her Jenny Cain mysteries. Her first novel was "Generous Death", and she began writing the culinary adventures of Mrs. Potter when the creator of the character, Virginia Rich, passed away in the mid 1980's. Rich's husband found a box of notes and newspaper clippings that were related to books that Virginia had hoped to write and they included a few first drafts of chapters. Pickard's relationship began with Rich when, as a fan, she wrote a letter to her after finishing "The Cooking School Murders." They were both mystery writers married to cattle ranchers. After her death, Rich's husband wanted to find another writer to continue Virginia's work, which eventually led to Pickard. The unfinished manuscript for "The 27-Ingredient Chili Con Carne Murders" was continued by Pickard and published in 1993. Before her death, Rich wrote "The Cooking School Murders" (1982), The Baked Bean Supper Murders" (1983), and The Nantucket Diet Murders" (1985).
The other Eugenia Potter novels written by Pickard were "The Blue Corn Murders," which turned the character Mrs. Potter into a more vigorous older woman, followed by "The Secret Ingredient Murders."
Pickard is the past president of Sisters in Crime and received the Anthony, Macavity and Agatha awards for five of the ten novels in her popular Jenny Cain series. She was also a two-time Edgar Award nominee and a winner of the American Mystery Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Tavia Gilbert demonstrates remarkable range in her narration of Pickard's spine-tingling thriller set in a rural Kansas ranch community, where mysterious secrets surrounding the wealthy and prominent Linder family come to light in chilling detail. Gilbert's performance as convicted murderer-and town pariah-Billy Crosby crackles with pentup rage. The scene in which protagonist Jody Linder-a 20-something woman who lost her parents in a crime spree for which Crosby was imprisoned two decades earlier-encounters the newly paroled Crosby in the parking lot of a local tavern demonstrates Gilbert's remarkable ability to heighten the suspense through vocal nuances and pacing. Gilbert also delivers an especially winning turn in her portrayal of Jody as a little girl too young to understand the sordid events around her. An edge-of-your seat listen. A Ballantine hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 8). (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A decades-old mystery is solved and a woman's haunting questions put to rest in Pickard's latest thriller. When she was just three years old, Jody Linder lost both parents in one night, when her father, Hugh Jay eldest son of the wealthiest rancher in the small town of Rose, Kansas was killed and her mother, Laurie, vanished. Raised by grandparents, Hugh Senior and Annabelle Linder, and with loving support from three uncles, Jody spends years collecting human detritus around the area's towering Testament Rocks, where authorities once searched for clues to Laurie's disappearance. Jody's world is rocked 23 years later when Billy Crosby, the vicious drunk convicted of her father's murder on circumstantial evidence, is released for a new trial; his return to town brings events to a head. In her second stand-alone (after The Virgin of Small Plains, 2006), Pickard shows her storytelling skills, weaving elements of deception, revenge, and romance into a novel with full-bodied characters who deal with tragedy as best they can; Annabelle Linder's encounter with Crosby's wife is particularly moving. From an award-winning author, this is engrossing fiction with an eminently satisfying denouement.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Thomas Perry, that smiling sadist who gets his kicks from outfoxing readers, is at his wicked best in strip (Otto Penzler/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26). Like any self-respecting gangland thriller, this witty specimen has a cast of touchy mobsters killing one another over money and turf and petty grievances. But because a devious mind is manipulating the genre conventions - allowing unpredictable characters rather than precision-tooled action to drive his story - the rules of the game are constantly changing. The initial setup couldn't be sweeter. Manco Kapak, who owns some strip clubs in Los Angeles and moves a little money for a major drug distributor, is personally affronted when a masked gunman holds him up while he is making a bank deposit, robbing him of a night's take. The money is nothing, but the insult cuts deep, and in short order the hunt is on for an out-of-towner named Joe Carver who had nothing to do with the crime but can't persuade the irascible Kapak to call off the dogs. Once we're comfortable with these ground rules (innocent man, up against a ruthless gangster, using his wits to stay alive) Perry pulls a switch. Although blameless, Carver is anything but harmless, and after failing to negotiate a truce with his enemy, he sets out to destroy him. Kapak, meanwhile, becomes more sympathetic by the minute, mainly by treating everyone on his staff, from trigger-happy bodyguards to weary strippers, with uncommon decency. By the time Perry polishes up his portrait, this aging and exhausted skin merchant resembles an honorable but fatally flawed king who stands to lose his entire realm because of a tragic error in judgment. And the wonderful characters keep on coming, activated by greed and open to opportunity: the faithful functionary who finally initiates a plan of his own; the superstitious killers who suspect that the boss is under a curse; the charmed robber who loses his luck when he hooks up with a wild babe thirsting for adventure; the bigamous police detective desperate for a way to finance the college educations of his five children; the nice waitress who could be Kapak's last chance for love. And let's not forget that man of mystery, Joe Carver. They may all start off as familiar types, but once Perry lets them loose, they refuse to go back in the box. At one time, part of Kansas was under a vast inland sea "with prehistoric sharks and other seafaring creatures," Nancy Pickard tells us in THE SCENT OF RAIN AND LIGHTNING (Ballantine, $25). Today only a towering formation known as Testament Rocks marks the spot. This is where Jody Linder comes to commune with her mother, who disappeared when Jody was 3 - on the same night the child's father was shot to death. After the no-good ranch hand who went to prison for the crime is released, Jody's uncles try to soften the blow, but it's far too late. The symbolism gets a bit heavy, with Jody likening herself to an amateur archaeologist engaged in the "macabre hobby" of digging around Testament Rocks for her mother's bones. Still, Pickard has the storytelling gift. Working with dramatic descriptions of the deep darkness of the plains and the pounding storms that turn the skies black, she offers a sober account of the cattle-ranching families who have survived for generations by keeping their secrets close and their guns handy. The plot structure of John Sandford's 20th Lucas Davenport novel, STORM PREY (Putnam, $27.95), is a beautiful thing to behold. The sturdy scaffolding, designed to support two interconnecting story lines, allows readers to follow both the misadventures of an incompetent gang of thieves, who inadvertently kill a pharmacy worker when they break into a hospital to steal drugs, and a complicated medical procedure to separate conjoined twins. Bridging these narratives is the panicked thieves' scheme to eliminate the only witness to their crime, a surgeon on the operating team who happens to be married to the detective charged with solving the case. But the pretty construction job isn't all bricks and mortar. Sandford invests the villains with enough psychotic quirks to keep the action fast, jumpy and violent. And while none of the white hats can match the perverse appeal of a 20-year-old killer biker whose crazy father named him after a 1982 Chevy Caprice, that delicate operation is every bit as intense as all the other daredevil stunts in this manhunt. Nicci Gerrard and Sean French normally turn out sophisticated psychological thrillers when they write as Nicci French. But they mistake mannerism for cleverness in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR (Minotaur, $25.99), a labored exercise in split-focus storytelling. Chopped up into scenes designated "Before" and "After," the narrative opens with a music teacher named Bonnie standing over a corpse and invites us to guess the identity of the victim and the role Bonnie played in his demise. There's a certain awkward charm to the "Before" scenes, in which she assembles a group of musical misfits to play in a bluegrass band, but not enough to keep disbelief at bay. Not when the heroine asks a not-so-close friend to help her get rid of the body and the dialogue goes like this. Heroine: "Do you want to know what happened?" Friend: "Do you want to tell me?" Heroine: "Not yet." Friend: "Then wait." To which the only reader response must be: "Well, take your time, ladies, and turn out the lights when you're done." Thomas Perry's thriller has a cast of touchy gangsters killing one another over money and turf.
Library Journal Review
Pretty young schoolteacher Jody Linder doesn't stray too far from small-town Rose, KS, returning to teach at her own high school. Jody is emotionally fragile, yet she's stubborn enough to live in the same house where her father was murdered 23 years earlier-the same night her mother vanished, also presumed dead. Raised by her grandparents and her uncles, Jody's believed their side of the story all her life. Town drunk Billy Crosby was convicted-wrongfully perhaps-of the murder. The bombshell that Billy is being released from prison opens up Jody's personal floodgates. She suddenly realizes how little she knows about her town and her family's motives. New revelations begin a thaw in Jody's heart and unleash in her a new determination to find the real killer. Verdict Stylistically similar with flashbacks, a determined young heroine, and a snappy twist, this novel is a worthy successor to the author's much-acclaimed The Virgin of Small Plains. Pickard's superb storytelling transports the reader into the characters' world, making all too real their dilemmas, their choices, and their willingness to believe the unlikely. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/10; library marketing.]-Teresa L. Jacobsen, Solano Cty. Lib., Fairfield, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One June 9, 2009 Until she was twenty-six, Jody Linder felt suspicious of happiness. She hated that about herself, because it tended to sour some otherwise pretty damn fine moments, but this was Rose, Kansas, after all. Only the year before, a pencil tornado had dropped down and killed three people only a few miles from her hometown. A tornado, when the sun was shining! In the winter, there were ice storms. In the summer, there were grass fires. At all times, people she knew went bankrupt, lost their homes, their ranches, their jobs. Or, they died just when you least expected them to. A person could, for instance, belong to a nice family living an ordinary life in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and on some innocent Saturday night, violent men could drop in like those tornadoes and turn those nice people into the dead stars of a Truman Capote book. Such things happened. That wasn't paranoia. It was a terrible fact that Jody knew better than anybody--or at least better than anybody whose father had not been murdered when she was three years old and whose mother had not disappeared the same night. Such things happened, and she was proof of it. Therefore--the past having proved to her the unreliability of the present--happiness made Jody Linder anxious. Feelings of safety and security got her checking around corners, lifting lids off bins, and parting shower curtains for fear of what might be hiding there, because you just never knew. A killer could hide in the corner, bugs lurked in bins, spiders jumped out of bathtubs. Happiness was fragile, precious, and suspect. "No peak not followed by a fall," she believed, which explained her flutter of worry as she lay naked on top of her bed with Red Bosch in the middle of a suspiciously beautiful Kansas afternoon. The air smelled too good for such a hot day, the light penetrating her eyelet curtains looked too delicate for noon. Most foreboding of all, the sex with this man she didn't love had been too damned good to be trusted beyond the (admittedly fine) moments of her satisfaction and his. She'd kept her eyes open during the finale, which meant she'd caught Red smirking down at her, looking pleased with himself. Don't flatter yourself, she'd nearly blurted, but then she thought, first of all, that wasn't kind and he didn't deserve it, and second of all, why shouldn't he flatter himself? Red was good at riding horses, rounding up cattle, baling hay, and this. She could hardly think of better talents in a man. "Pretty girl," Red murmured, tracing a lazy finger down her sternum. "Sweaty girl," Jody said, lifting his hand off and laying it back on his own damp belly. He laughed, a self-satisfied growl, deep in his chest. A hot, pollen-scented breeze blew through the open windows. She smelled honeysuckle, which wasn't blooming yet, and lilac, which had already bloomed and gone. These things were impossible, they were all in her imagination, she knew, and they were just the sort of deceptions that the smallest feeling of contentment might spring on her. She and Red lay sprawled on their backs like sated puppies who'd just had their bellies scratched for half an hour. Lying a few inches away from him, so their limbs couldn't touch and stick, Jody let out an irrepressible sigh of pleasure. Immediately, she wanted to take it back, suck the breath right back into her lungs, because God knew she couldn't let the universe be hearing any of that. No peak not followed by a fall . . . The sound of a vehicle turning onto her street made her turn her face toward the windows, alert to the possibility of unpleasant surprise. "Did you hear that, Red?" "What?" "Shh!" The sound of the single vehicle turned into the sound of a second truck and then another, which multiplied her alertness exponentially. Jody pressed her elbows into the bottom s Excerpted from The Scent of Rain and Lightning: A Novel by Nancy Pickard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
