SPIRIT LAKE PAYBACK

A group of wronged women takes female empowerment to the extreme in this novel.

As he did in Prisoners of War (2018), Scott taps into American history to roll out a complex yarn that begins during World War II. Mildred Mercer is a teenage prostitute in Dorris, California, in the mid-1940s who is swept away from her downtrodden existence by Pat McBride, a generous soul who buys her a bus ticket to Seattle to start a new life. Headstrong and independent, Millie catches the eye of neighbor Duano Lagomarsino, and a courtship simmers quickly into marriage and a relocation to Bayview, Idaho. Their marriage (and much of the other subplots) hinges on what the author calls “life’s little curve balls,” and soon, Millie’s former occupation comes back to haunt her. But her fierce sense of self-preservation kicks in. This story is joined by the tale of Eleanor Greenberg, whose family is sent to Auschwitz. She is separated from her loved ones to become the pre-pubescent obsession of a Nazi scientist who sexually abuses her. Upon her escape to a kibbutz overlooking the Sea of Galilee, she promises her captor they will reunite one day. The scientist later becomes a United States Navy researcher in Idaho searching for Nazi sympathizers but winds up face to face with “patient huntress” Eleanor. Boosting this plotline are the period details Scott homes in on, such as the price of housing and the apprehensive nature of a traumatized society during wartime. Adding to this melodrama is the intriguing tale of Bernadette Albers, the fifth victim of a serial bigamist con man who “specialized in middle-aged women of questionable beauty.” Bernadette is, like the wives before her, double-crossed and swindled by her duplicitous husband, Randall, but vows to end his string of misdeeds permanently. All of these searing sketches coalesce in Northern Idaho, where the timeline advances to the mid-’90s as the skeletal remains of nine bodies are discovered at the bottom of Spirit Lake. Readers will easily identify those remains and connect them to the men’s cutthroat fates. The sheer brevity of Scott’s novel belies the heft of its central theme about the resurgence of the past and how it can lead to both a painful reunion and an opportunity to avenge atrocities and festering wounds.

A deceptively slim yet viciously potent slice of female retribution.