Starvation Lake

Hockey as a metaphor for life? If so, then Bryan Gruley scores a "hat trick" in his fast-paced, powerful novel. Rich Orlow's appealing narration adds the finesse. After failing in Detroit as a journalist, Gus Carpenter returns to his Michigan hometown and becomes editor of the local newspaper. Ten years earlier, the much-loved high school hockey coach disappeared after his snowmobile sank beneath the ice of Starvation Lake. Now pieces of his snowmobile are found--in a different lake, miles from the scene, revealing a bullet hole. Facts skitter in all directions, the mystery deepens, and Orlow beautifully captures the sense of a small town hunkering down to hide its tightly closeted skeletons and the pervasive sense of menace lurking behind almost every smile. Strong listening. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Starred review from January 19, 2009
Gruley's outstanding debut effortlessly incorporates his inside knowledge of both the newspaper business and his hockey avocation into a tale of violence and betrayal that will remind many of Dennis Lehane. After crossing an ethical line while writing an investigative series for the Detroit Times
, reporter Gus Carpenter has returned to his hometown of Starvation Lake, Mich., to work for the local paper, whose stories mostly reflect the pedestrian and placid nature of smalltown life. That changes when evidence surfaces that the town's legendary hockey coach, Jack Blackburn, who disappeared after an apparent snowmobile accident a decade earlier, was actually murdered. Carpenter's reopening of the case, which has personal resonance for him (he'd been the goalie for the amateur boys' team Blackburn coached), shakes all sorts of skeletons loose. Gruley, the Wall Street Journal
's Chicago bureau chief, has a gift for making all his characters, from the leads to the bit players, realistic.