YONDERS, ILLINOIS

In this novel, a murder suspect returns to his native town in Illinois nearly 40 years after the crime, spurring the local police chief to doggedly reignite the investigation.

In 1959, Keelan Putnam is trying to straighten out the crooked path of his life—a petty criminal since he was a child, he manages to land both a wife, Mae Rowan, and a job in his native Yonders, Illinois. This sleepy town, which “only made the papers when there were fires, murders or some silliness,” is brought to vivid life by Noyes. But when Keelan suddenly loses his job, he angrily heads to Earl Wyatt’s farmhouse. Keelan had sold stolen goods to Earl before and knew he kept a considerable amount of cash at home. That plan goes terribly wrong, though, and Keelan ends up murdering not only Earl, but also his wife, Esther, and his daughter, Rachel, a “feeble-minded” girl. Keelan catches a lucky break when Freeman Lane, a scrawny Black kid, suddenly and inexplicably confesses to the crime. Decades later, in 1998, Keelan returns to Yonders, arousing the scrutiny of Buster Lawton, who at the time of the killings was a rookie cop and is now the chief of police. Lawton is convinced Keelan is responsible for the Wyatt murders.

In this complex but never superfluously convoluted drama, Noyes sensitively charts the killings’ ramifications, which crescendo nearly 40 years later. At the heart of the story is the fragility of a person’s destiny and the myriad ways in which a minor setback can snowball into a tragedy—a gripping idea unfurled by the author with considerable dramatic power. Keelan was not destined to be a criminal, let alone a murderer, a fact his mother, Etna, affectingly reflects on: “Seemed like only yesterday, as folks say, that those little kids were running in and out, playing cowboys and Indians, shooting toy guns and whooping it up out back in the alley. Jezzie knew Keelan when he was still little and good, before he turned.” There are some small missteps on Noyes’ part—he tends to indulge in heavy-handed attempts at cheap symbolism. Keelan’s mother likes to discuss her own hometown of Regret, Kentucky, a clumsy foreshadowing of her son’s fate. In addition, a figure referred to as “the Devil” makes several melodramatic appearances and issues cryptic moral counsel: “You can’t rest until the reckoning.” These transparent literary devices are especially unfortunate because the story doesn’t need them—readers will be moved by Noyes’ extraordinary blend of a crime drama and an almost biblical tale of the elusiveness of moral redemption. As captivating as Lawton is—an invariant defender of justice in a morally ambiguous world—the most subtly drawn character is Keelan, a darkly violent man who, under a different set of circumstances, might have become a decent one. This is a sumptuously engrossing novel, one bursting with insights and a keen sense of the delicate balance between luck and moral choice that defines a life.

An absorbing moral drama with great depth.