When Johnny Came Marching Home

August 6, 2012
Predictability mars this otherwise solid historical from Edgar-winner Heffernan (The Dead Detective). In 1865, Jubal Foster, a Union soldier who lost an arm in the Civil War, returns home to Jerusalem’s Landing, Vt., to serve as deputy to his father, the town’s sheriff. The job is generally a quiet one, including tax collection and resolving civil disputes, until someone fatally stabs Johnny Harris, the local minister’s son. During the war, Harris gave more than one of his fellow veterans from Jerusalem’s landing motive to kill him. Flashbacks reveal the horrors Foster and his hometown comrades lived through on and off the battlefield, but they fall short of comparable scenes in such Civil War fiction as Jeff Shaara’s Killer Angels or Owen Parry’s Abel Jones mysteries (Rebels of Babylon, etc.). Neither Foster’s dogged, methodical sleuthing nor the arc of his longing for the girl he left behind offers any surprises. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins/Loomis Literary.