Man Who Met Tr

While driving along a South Dakota country road, Carl Wilcox (Barbed Wire Noose) comes upon an auto accident with three dead and two survivors, one of them a little girl. He takes the child, Alma, to the nearest town, and finds that one of the victims is Alma's mother, Winnie Ellison, a widow of uncertain reputation who was housekeeper to Judge Calvin Carlson. The other survivor, Cody Jerome, is the man she's been stepping out with. The judge hires Wilcox to look into the suspicious ``accident.'' Meanwhile, Mr. Brundage, a banker and mortal enemy of the judge, wants to clear up the mystery surrounding the death of Winnie's husband, Ellsworth, who was killed by a train. As Wilcox investigates in the close atmosphere of a Depression-era small town, he is greeted with resentment and hostility, partly because he is spending a lot of time with Evangeline, the local belle. The trail leads them to nearby Cranston, where tough guy Bo Grummen had a grudge against Jerome, and to events that took place in the previous generation. Adams deftly handles the interlocking relationships and nicely conveys the tone of the era, although first-person narrator Wilcox is sometimes a little too patently hick in his language. The denouement is tragic, with a true-to-life ambiguity to the resolution. (June)