In his bleakly beautiful seventh novel, Scottish author Burnside (The Devil's Footprint
) delivers a cautionary tale illustrating that greed and an indifference to suffering are the real horrors of modern life. In recent years, five teenage boys have disappeared from the coastal village of Innertown, where an abandoned chemical plant deep in the forest is slowly poisoning its rapidly declining population. The official line is that the missing boys are seeking a better life away from the town whose “sole business is slow decay.” A 15-year-old lad, who's found solace in books and foreign films that he can barely understand, is determined to find out what happened to his friends and why the town's lone cop spends so much time in those tarnished woods. Burnside expertly details an apocalyptic landscape where the “expectation of failure” is rampant. While the ending feels hurried, Burnside's flawless prose explores how defeat is only a state of mind. (Mar.)
