"I couldn't quite get us back without incident for the burial of my father. We ran into a little trouble along the way. It took us two stolen cars along the interstate to get us home." Collins, an Irish-American writer whose last novel, The Keepers of Truth, was shortlisted for the Booker, has perfected the art of beginning a novel, as the sentences above attest. The year is 1979, and narrator Frank Cassidy is stuck in a dead end job in New Jersey. Orphaned at the age of five when his parents were burnt to death in a fire, Frank is still haunted by his past and fights off fits of clinical depression. He's married to Honey and has two kids, 14-year-old Robert Lee and five-year-old Ernie. Robert Lee is actually the son of Honey's first husband, a murderer now on death row. When Frank discovers by chance that his adoptive father, Ward Cassidy, was shot and killed on his farm in Cooper, Mich., he packs up the family and returns to his hometown, in spite of his stepbrother Norman's advice not to come. With little to return to in New Jersey, the family decides to stay in Cooper for a while. Frank gets a job in security at a local college and in his spare time investigates the link between the mystery of Ward's murder and the mysteries surrounding his own early life. The connection seems to hinge on the identity of Ward's murderer. Is he really Chester Green, the presumably long dead son of a local farmer? (And why would Chester kill Ward?) Contrary to Scott Fitzgerald's oft-repeated dictum that there are no second acts in American life, Collins shows that second acts are what America is all about: for all the battered existences on display in this novel, there's a faith, a persistent optimism, that lifts them above the tawdriness of their details. (Oct.)
