The Constant Heart

Nova’s latest effort is an evocative family yarn that follows a father and son at odds with each other’s morality and a wild-card woman pulling the strings. Jake, the novel’s capable 17-year-old narrator, is the son of mismatched parents, a New Age–obsessed mother and a faithless father, a wildlife biologist who spends his nights on the couch turning a blind eye to his wife’s infidelity. Life for Jake in rural northeastern New York becomes spiced with the brash, hard-knock life lessons taught by brazen outsider Sara McGill, the target of his unrequited crush. When a misguided attempt to deal drugs in a women’s prison is botched, Sara is arrested and the story fast forwards to find Jake as an astronomy teacher who is reunited with the devilish Sara when they both happen upon a Radio Shack that is being robbed, followed by a days-long, defining group fishing trip where crushing secrets and murderous intentions bubble to the surface. Nova (The Book of Dreams) has again produced expertly drawn characters and carefully measured, suspenseful prose with some surprises, all with undertones orbiting around Einstein’s cosmological constant theory of relativity. But it’s bad girl Sara who steals the show by sweeping everyone into her swirling cyclone of lethal predicaments while coquettishly insisting she “didn’t bring the plague to your house.” Agent: The Hendra Agency. (Sept.)