Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Before Familiar Woods is Ian Pisarcik’s debut, and it’s an understatement to say that it is an absolutely outstanding one.

The setting could hardly been more dispiriting–a small, remote town in Vermont’s Green Mountain range, waiting for the worst that winter has in store.  After a very brief first chapter we’re introduced to Ruth Fenn, sitting on her front porch with her husband’s deer rifle across her knees.

Coming up her rutted gravel drive is Della Downing, formerly Ruth’s closest friend but now her bitterest enemy.  Della says she is looking for her husband Horace, and she thinks he’s with Ruth’s husband Elam.  Neither man came home last night, but Ruth isn’t as upset as Della; this isn’t the first time Elam went out and didn’t return for a day or two.  That has happened more than once since the tragedy.

Ruth and Della each had one son, Mathew and William respectively.  The boys were friends and were fifteen years old when their nude and bloodied bodies were found on a trail in the Green Mountain National Forest, surrounded by needles and beer cans.  The medical examiner couldn’t say whether they died from exposure, being attacked by animals, or from the fentanyl-laced heroin found in their bloodstreams.  But did it really matter?

Mathew had always been an outlier, and so it was easy for the citizens of North Falls to put the blame for the deaths on him.  At first people thought that the boys had gotten high, hallucinated, and attacked each other.  But then a statement from a Vermont state trooper painted a different, even more disturbing, picture.  He hypothesized that Mathew had lured his friend into the isolated area, attempted to have sex with him, and then, possibly being rebuffed, killed him.

That became the story that nearly everyone believed, and Ruth and Elam became pariahs.  Then Della made things worse with her statements about William befriending Mathew because the latter had no other friends and William felt sorry for him.  Naturally, that ended the friendship between the two grieving mothers until three years later when Della shows up in front of Ruth’s house and asks Ruth if she knows where their husbands have gone.

Milk Raymond is a veteran returning to North Falls from Iraq.  Milk’s former wife is a drug addict, and while he was in the army she abandoned their son Daniel to run off with another addict, leaving the child in the care of her mother.  Now that Milk is home, he needs to find a job to support himself and Daniel, a decent place to live, and the strength to deal with these problems, and he turns to Ruth for help..

Before Familiar Woods definitely is a mystery dealing with the deaths of the teenagers and the whereabouts of Ruth’s and Della’s husbands.  It is also a brilliant, disturbing novel that looks into rural poverty, homophobia, divisions between friends, and the difficult issues of parenting.  

You can read more about Ian Pisarcik at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.