Book Review: Readings

Prince of Lost Places

Putnam, 176 pp., $23.95

In Prince of Lost Places, bedraggled husband David Warden hires a detective to track down and bring back his wife, Martha. After a tragedy at the elementary school, Martha has taken their son Duncan to live (indefinitely) in a cave on the Rio Grande. There she hopes to keep him safe from the horrible, innumerable dangers the wider world holds for children: abductions, snipers, poisoned lakes, a bomb in school. As the book unfolds, Martha seems less insane than just unhinged by recent events. Hepinstall carefully doles out pieces of information until the tragedy is revealed, and we understand the young mother's flight. Martha calls the incident a "terrible lottery; it could have been any of us." For the mother, the only way to ensure the son's safety is to remove him from the outside world and all of its evils.

The detective, posing as a gentle desert nomad recuperating from a bad marriage, finds them and gradually insinuates himself into their lives. Bearing the name of Martha's dead father, Andrew, he makes her feel less anxious; he understands. She feels that he is a good influence on Duncan. Andrew serves as consoler, protector. After several weeks -- and Andrew's cold-turkey rebound from alcohol -- a strange and needy relationship develops. As implausible as the love affair might seem, the last two chapters reveal the underlying truth that makes us understand each character's motivation. In one fell swoop, Hepinstall artfully peals back fiction from fact, delusion from reality.

To say that Hepinstall's third novel demonstrates her accomplishment in the suspense genre doesn't go far enough (previous books include The Absence of Nectar and The House of Gentle Men). What distinguishes her fiction is the sincerity and candor she allows her characters. Their exchanges, particularly between the mother and son in Prince of Lost Places, hold true-to-life humor and sadness. After Martha's botched first attempt at fishing, Duncan throws a fit about the dead fish, about missing his father, and the lack of chocolate in their cave home. He hides for hours while Martha looks for him. The next morning he's as good as new: "He hummed a morning song to himself as I seethed on my sleeping bag. Brat. 'Mommy?' he whispered. I kept my eyes closed, pretending sleep. He was just a boy, I told myself, but I couldn't help remembering my panic in the dark, and imagining how he'd stood there in the recesses of the cave and listened to me shriek his name."

Hepinstall's telling contains scraps of what all parents have thought about or said to their own children. The rants and taunts they've tolerated. The worries they try to bear on dark nights. The story's sharp-turn ending left me stunned, but Hepinstall's handling of the immense responsibility we feel for our loved ones -- that compulsion to protect them -- truly amazed me. -- Tommi Ferguson

Kathy Hepinstall will be at BookPeople on Tuesday, Jan. 7, at 7pm.