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A complex story of crime, revenge, and, underneath it all, love of the highest order, written by one of my all-time favorite authors, that is so slowly-building immersive it will take a mind-muddled reader a heroic effort to shift sticky gears back to “real” life.

Book 2 in the Cal Hooper series, this edition can be read alone, but it is highly recommended to read “The Searcher” first for an incredible backstory that will add layers to the tangled, tentacled relationship between these continuing characters and their setting.

In this story, Cal, a retired Chicago cop, settled for a couple of years now in the remote and mountainous Irish village of Ardnakelty, is still feeling his way around the community — an insular minefield, with a claustrophobic and intricate code of behavior and ethics, mired in generations and history, devastatingly opaque (and more than a little brutal) to all but deep insiders.

With his carpentry-loving sidekick Trey, now fifteen, as tough-as-nails and sullen as her teenage years allow for, and his girlfriend, the indomitable Lena, Cal has built his own tentative community of sorts, and is struggling to maintain the blossoming peace and safety he can barely feel inching its way through his new circumstances.

This will all be threatened by the sudden re-appearance of Trey’s n’er-do-well father, the shyster Johnny Reddy, a “twinkly-eyed twerp” whose presence back on the mountain can only mean trouble.

All in all, an absolutely gorgeous read, packed with a serpentine web of one-of-a-kind relationships that will get under your skin, and linger, long after the last page (and yet another humdinger of an ending).