SHELTER FROM THE STORM

Mewshaw’s ninth (after True Crime, 1991, etc.), this about a father who looks for his missing son-in-law in a lawless Central Asian country.

Readers may find themselves thinking at first that they’re reading a treatment for an X-Files episode: in an unnamed Central Asian country, a boy has emerged from the wilderness who appears, for all anyone can tell, to have been raised by wolves. After scaring the locals with his frighteningly animalistic ways, he’s taken in by an American woman, Kathryn Matthews, who has been living in the country for some time, doing research. Newly arrived in-country is protagonist Zack McClintock, a middle-aged American private intelligence analyst. Fletcher, the son-in-law whom Zack never quite trusted, had been working in this country until very recently, when he was kidnapped by unknown people demanding a million-dollar ransom. The odd part is that a second ransom letter was received in which the writer said they didn’t want money, but simply wanted a boy taken to the US for treatment. After direly discouraging warnings from the local US State Department, Zack heads up-country with a massive, terrifying Russian mafiya named Misha as driver. Once there, he finds himself in a familiar late-20th-century hodgepodge of fanatic Islam and clan violence working its bloody way out around the shards of the old Soviet state. Zack soon meets Kathryn and the wolf boy and also has run-ins with: a dissolute priest, a doomed romantic now running a decrepit hotel; his girlfriend, who dreams of escaping to Rome; and the fanatic mullah who turns any conversation into a strung-together series of Koran references. As a thriller with literary pretensions, this is halfheartedly successful, though Mewshaw seems inordinately impressed with his own admittedly decent but often show-offy prose. While the setting is vivid, the generic nature of its nameless country reduces the dramatic stakes all around.

A generally well-composed story that dead-ends in the pointless.