Dig Two Graves

A heart-tugging child-in-peril plot drives this thoughtful crime novel from Powers (Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story). Ethan “Hercules” Holt won an Olympic decathlon medal in his early 20s amid a steroid doping scandal involving a teammate. Now 39, Ethan is a classics professor at Canaan College, “just south of the Vermont border,” and a single father raising a 13-year-old daughter, Skip, after his wife’s death in a car accident. Following a father-daughter argument, Skip is kidnapped and Ethan receives rhyming notes that detail actions he must perform to get her back, each of which evokes the mythological 12 labors of Hercules, as well as his events in the Olympic decathlon. The kidnapper’s knowledge of Ethan’s past is eerily complete, and Ethan realizes he faces a foe out to revenge a wrong he can’t remember committing. Powers nicely depicts the pathos of Ethan’s situation, though the central motif of the “labors” becomes fairly muddled as the story progresses to a twist-filled resolution. Agent: Jennifer Lyons, Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency. (Dec.)