Crabb

In this outlandish novel from Kearns (Embers), an Irish expat in Texas recounts his friendship with the real-life Brian Zimmerman (1972–1996), who gained fame in the 1980s when he was elected mayor of his tiny unincorporated hometown at age 11. Brian’s death at 24 from heart failure arouses his friend and neighbor Ed’s suspicions of an assassination, and he rehashes his long conversations with Brian in search of answers, beginning with Brian’s account of running unofficially for mayor of Crabb to save the town from being annexed by Houston. Kearns, who admits to embellishment in an author’s note, casts child mayor Brian’s ascent to the global stage as a tall tale. Brian is invited to a conference in Paris, where French president François Mitterrand reveals to him that the 1947 Roswell incident in New Mexico was a UFO crash, not a downed weather balloon as the U.S. Air Force claimed. With Brian’s days in the political limelight behind him, he drifts as a young man into drug dealing. In Ed’s view, Brian’s awareness of a convoluted scheme involving CIA operatives trying to control the drug trade, coupled with his dangerous knowledge of the Roswell cover-up, led the government to kill him to protect its secrets. Kearns’s prose is stilted (“I could never refuse the opportunity to learn of what tidings he conveyed”), but there’s pleasure in following the fanciful plot. This is catnip for the conspiracy-minded. (Self-published)