Darkness the Color of Snow

July 27, 2015
Gritty and tense, Cobb’s (Crazy Heart) new novel exposes small-town hypocrisy, petty rivalries, jealousy, and media-fueled hysteria as a young rookie police officer is unfairly blamed for a hit-and-run fatality. When patrolman Ronald Forbert tries to arrest Matt Laferiere for drunk driving, the confrontation turns violent and deadly, and Ronald must defend his actions in a town where everyone knows there was bad blood between him and Matt. Police Chief Gordy Hawkins and his officers back up Ronald’s story, and so do three witnesses, but as public pressure to blame someone mounts, one coerced witness changes his version, with disastrous results. Lydell is a (fictional) rural farm and mill town in an unspecified state, dying a slow economic death, and the poisonous gossip feeds the local TV and print media, eventually becoming so frenzied that it interferes with the investigation and search for the hit-and-run driver. Nobody wins in this tale, but that never detracts from its undeniable power.

June 15, 2015
A simple traffic stop is the first link in a chain of tragedy in Cobb's novel of small-town political maneuvering. Cobb (With Blood in Their Eyes, 2012, etc.) opens with a tense, impeccably rendered scene in which Ronny Forbert, the young patrolman at the heart of the book, stops a car being driven by Matt Laferiere, a former high school friend who has never given up his delinquent ways. When Ronny places Matt under arrest for drunken driving, a struggle ensues, and Matt is fatally struck by an oncoming car. Cobb wants to show how the outrage stemming from Matt's death proves a useful tool with which the local power brokers push their own agenda. When he focuses on the police chief, Gordy Hawkins, a decent man trying to carry on in the face of his wife's death, the pettiness that is his subject assumes a human face. But the precise observation of habit and motive necessary for this kind of social anatomy is lacking. The dead boy, Matt, is such a troublemaker that the sudden anger following his death feels forced, and Cobb is sloppy about establishing the motives of the pols who want to benefit from that anger and what it is they hope to gain. This isn't helped by a last-minute twist that feels meant to stand in for the missing motivation. Cobb has succeeded in portraying the dead-end dreariness of contemporary small-town American life, but that dreariness seems to have settled over the author as well as his characters.

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July 1, 2015
The citizens of Lydell, a small, struggling town somewhere in the northeastern U.S., are well served by their small police force. The chief and his officers balance professionalism with compassion for a community that sees only harder times coming. But a routine traffic stop by a rookie cop quickly escalates into a bizarre hit-and-run death, and the incident becomes a flashpoint for residents beaten down by lost jobs and despair. Cobb's primary characters are rookie cop Ronny Forbert, Police Chief Gordy Hawkins, and Lydell itself, and he makes them all come alive. Forbert was raised by an alcoholic father and given a path to a modest future by Gordy after Forbert's teenage scrape with the law. Gordy is a grieving widower, but he's deeply committed to his town and its residents. Lydell is a place nearly all readers will recognize. The arc of the novel is unremittingly bleak, but Cobb's graceful prose gives the story power and dignity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)