Deborah Donovan

Southern novelist Jill McCorkle’s latest character-driven and emotionally vivid novel is set—as is most of her previous work—in Fulton, North Carolina, a small town in which the reader quickly becomes immersed. Her story centers on the residents and staff of Pine Haven Retirement Center—their stories adroitly interwoven by McCorkle, layer by layer, as she gradually illuminates how their pasts intersected far before they came together in the present.

Joanna is a hospice volunteer who keeps a notebook with an entry for each person she visits when they die—their favorite things, their memories, their last words. One of her first journal entries was about her own father’s death, including the fact that he never told her he loved her. Joanna’s somewhat mysterious past includes numerous marriages, somewhere between three and seven, depending on who’s doing the gossiping. Her best friend is C.J.—a tattooed and pierced single mom half Joanna’s age whose life so far has been one long struggle. She now helps groom the hair and nails of Pine Haven’s grateful residents. Sadie, 85 and wheelchair-bound, is a former third-grade teacher who sees an 8-year-old inside everyone she meets. Her best friend and loyal companion is Abby, the 13-year-old who lives next door and visits Pine Haven daily to escape her constantly bickering parents.

McCorkle interweaves the stories of these unlikely friendships to offer penetrating insight into the different routes aging might lead us along, and how we think about death—for ourselves, as well as the ones we love. But her signature humor shines through, lightening the mood just when it’s most needed. This is a beautifully written, perceptive and poignant novel that will linger in readers’ minds for a long while.

Santa Fe author Jo-Ann Mapson has written 10 previous novels set in the contemporary West, including Solomon’s Oak (2010), a prequel to her latest engaging, character-driven story.

As Finding Casey opens, Glory Vigil and her second husband, Joseph, have recently moved to Santa Fe from California. They are renovating an old Pueblo-style adobe house—and just as the novel opens Glory, who is 41, discovers she is pregnant for the first time. She and Joseph have an adopted daughter, Juniper, who came to live with them four years earlier. She is now 18, and a junior at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Juniper had been through a lot by the time she found herself on Glory’s doorstep as a troubled 14-year-old, four years after her older sister Casey disappeared without a trace. Their mother never recovered, and died a year later from an overdose; shortly thereafter their father walked out and never returned, leaving Juniper to fend for herself. She’s still haunted by her sister’s disappearance, and can’t convince herself that Casey is dead.

Mapson interweaves the story of the Vigils with that of Laurel Smith, member of a new-age cult near Espanola. Her daughter Aspen is gravely ill, and she has walked and hitchhiked with her to the local hospital, since the cult leader doesn’t allow medical treatment to its members, and discourages any contact by Laurel with the outside world. In those chapters written through Laurel’s eyes and in her words, Mapson gradually paints a picture of the pathetic life she has been living—and her remarkable resilience to carry on for the sake of her child.

These stories intersect during a field study undertaken by Juniper’s archeology class at a pueblo near Espanola. Mapson is a marvelous storyteller, and even though the reader may guess the novel’s denouement before she actually reveals it, readers will be engaged from the first page by her cast of likable characters: the ever-positive Glory; Joseph, photographer and chef extraordinaire; Juniper, who loves her new family, but always has her sister in the back of her mind; and Laurel, the abused and isolated young woman who lives in fear amidst memories of happier times.

Readers who enjoy the family-driven novels of Jodi Picoult and Jacquelyn Mitchard will find Mapson’s latest a terrific read.

Aaron and Dorothy may have seemed an odd couple to family, neighbors and co-workers. Aaron, crippled in his right arm and leg by a childhood illness and plagued by sporadic stuttering, runs the family vanity publishing business, whose biggest success to date is a series of “Beginner’s” books—The Beginner’s Wine Guide, The Beginner’s Monthly Budget or, most recently, The Beginner’s Book of Birdwatching. Something on the order of the Dummies books, Aaron feels, but “more dignified.” Dorothy was a doctor: “work-obsessed,” according to Aaron’s sister, Nandina; she left early for the office, stayed late and “barely knew how to boil an egg.” And yet, as Aaron recalls after Dorothy’s sudden death at the hands of a fallen oak tree, they were “happily, unremarkably married.”

After her death, Aaron feels as if he’s been “erased,” or “ripped in two” . . . until he begins getting visits from Dorothy. At first he’s afraid to speak, worried she will leave if he does. But gradually he engages her in conversation—asking if she’s happy, if she misses being alive—even revisiting some of their ancient and petty arguments. But he also realizes they really loved each other, even if each of them was somehow unable to demonstrate that love when they had the chance.

Anne Tyler’s novels (this is her 19th) have often been peopled with eccentric male characters. In 1974’s Celestial Navigation, it was Jeremy, a loner who crafted intricate paper collages for a living; Macon in The Accidental Tourist (1985) was a travel writer who hated traveling; and Liam, in 2010’s Noah’s Compass, was a would-be philosopher who taught fifth grade at a second-rate private elementary school.

Aaron joins this celebrated group, portrayed with Tyler’s signature quirky humor and her gift for drawing her characters into awkward situations all too uncomfortably familiar to every reader. Peripheral characters enrich the mix, including the ever-pragmatic Nandina, and their secretary, Peggy, a “pink-and-gold person with . . . a fondness for thrift-store outfits involving too many bits of lace,” both of whom alternately try to nurture Aaron and chide him for his inability to move on. This glimpse into personal loss limned with an unexpectedly bright future will be welcomed by Tyler’s many admirers.

The seemingly bucolic setting of South Carolina’s Low Country reveals its seamier side in Bret Lott’s latest novel, a follow-up to 1999’s The Hunt Club. Lott continues the story of Huger Dillard, now 27, a college dropout living with his parents, and still clueless as to his calling in life.

Lott paints his main character layer by layer, slowly filling in the details of why he calls his blind father Unc, why he dropped out of UNC at Chapel Hill, and why he and his girlfriend Tabitha separated (she is now a postdoc at Stanford). Injected into this somewhat convoluted domestic drama is a woman’s body, discovered as the novel opens by Huger and Unc as they arrive by boat at the members-only golf course attached to their posh community of Landgrave Hall in the middle of the night—the only time Unc can practice his swing without being embarrassed.

The discovery of a woman’s partially eaten body in the pluff mud, just as Huger is about to set anchor, is horrific enough, but it’s complicated by the fact that Huger is also observed wearing illegal night-vision goggles by two officers at the Naval Weapons Station half a mile away. How Huger obtained those goggles (actually, Unc won them in one of his Thursday night poker games) is just one of the many backstories Lott introduces one by one, each part of his tale of long-buried family secrets, terrorists housed in the local Navy brig and sleeper cells patiently waiting to exact their carefully planned revenge.

Dead Low Tide is being labeled a “literary thriller,” which typically is a hard role to fill. It may not be erudite enough for fans of Le Carré, or suspenseful enough for followers of Nelson DeMille. But Lott’s timely premise—the possibility of terrorist sleeper cells existing for years in unlikely places, waiting for the word to unleash their pent-up hatred—is both shocking and plausible enough to garner its own niche of readers. And the way in which Lott weaves this dark subplot into past events, revealed slowly to both Huger and the reader, makes the conclusion of this portrait of Charleston’s darker side even more satisfying.