Rue Dunwitty grew up in Amethyst, Texas but now lives and works in San Francisco. Returning home to visit her aging grandmother, she sees a flyer in the supermarket window about a missing teenager.
There is no shortage of suspects, and it's to Saylor's credit that I never stopped suspecting any of them, so much so that when Rue ends up with one of them, it feels slightly creepy and disturbing rather than an earned happy ending. The TV-preacher angle was lazy and overdone by the 1980s, and it's disappointing that Saylor couldn't come up with a more compelling motivation for horrific crime than Judeo-Christian Sexual Values.
While the book has a contemporary, Saylor is clearly influenced by the feel of the small-town Texas he knew as a boy. It's very strange for an Austinite to think of the possession of an SUV or a cell phone as flaunting debaucherous luxury in 2003, and even more so for a San Franciscan to conclude that only a remarkably unfriendly or private person might have Caller ID; it may have been twelve years ago, but I'm pretty sure it came with most phone packages even then.
In addition, the bias of a man who got out of small-town Texas when the getting was good and has never looked back is on emphatic display. Everyone in Amethyst is fat, old, stupid, closed-minded, unhappily married, or some combination of the above. As Rod Dreher learned, people can live full and meaningful lives in fly-over country even without escaping to one of the coasts -- or at least to Austin.
On the plus side, Saylor's descriptions of cold Texas days in December were so evocative that while I was reading, I was shocked to walk outside and find it warm, I had been so drawn into his narrative. That hasn't happened since I read The Long Winter on a hot summer day as a child.
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