The Madstone

Crook (The Which Way Tree) sets her underwhelming epistolary novel in 1868 Texas, where a young man gets in over his head after lending help to a group of strangers. The ordinary life of Benjamin Shreve, a Texas woodworker, is upended after he encounters a pregnant woman named Nell and her four-year-old son, Tot, on the run from her missing husband’s brothers, a rageful bunch known as the Swamp Fox gang. (They claim Nell murdered her husband, while she maintains he abandoned her in poverty after the Civil War.) Crook’s narrative is framed as a letter from Benjamin to Tot, recounting the treacherous journey Benjamin takes to escort mother and son to safety along with their fellow stagecoach passenger, Dickie. As the unlikely comrades attempt to reach the Louisiana border, Dickie claims to have unearthed a cursed necklace that may carry misfortune to whoever possesses it, and Benjamin falls in love with Nell. While this has the exciting and fast-paced plot of a serviceable western, there’s nothing special in Benjamin’s voice. “Reckoning offers more peace to the heart, as it has an end,” he claims in his letter, but his curious lack of intimacy and distance from the story’s tense events leave little evidence of such a reckoning on the page. Readers will have a tough time seeing this one through to the end. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (Nov.)