Blue Hole

It is the summer of 1969 in Barrington, Ga., and Charley Selkirk, a 17-year-old white Southerner, is at a critical point in his life in reporter and columnist Gearino's third novel (after the popular What the Deaf Mute Heard; Counting Coup). During the first year of school integration, Charley is booted out of school just weeks before his graduation because he aggressively tackles the team's star quarterback, after the quarterback bullies a new black player during spring drills. Also abandoned by his longtime girlfriend, Charley lives with his withdrawn mother in a house haunted by the drowning death of his younger brother years ago. Then, by chance, Charley meets Tallasee, a Barrington native who is back in town after years as a model and photographer and a brief, unhappy marriage to a rock musician. Tallasee hires Charley as an assistant while she completes a book of portraits of mountain women, but it is as partners that they undertake a search for a missing boy, the grandson of one of the elderly women. Their quest takes them to a squalid commune set in the hills near Barrington, where Lucas, a Vietnam vet tortured by flashback memories, befriended the missing boy. When it becomes clear that the boy is dead, everyone is convinced that Lucas is guilty, but Charley thinks otherwise, and he sets a trap for a killer whose unmasking sends shock waves through the little town. Though his pacing is sometimes uneven, Gearino strongly but subtly evokes the turbulent summer of '69 in small-town Georgia, coming at racial tension, the counterculture and the legacy of Vietnam from unexpected angles and finding redemption in Charley and Tallasee's unusual friendship, the unburdening of family secrets and the bittersweet triumph of truth and justice. 7-city author tour. (Aug.)