Under the Falls
A Novel
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- € 10,99
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The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls returns with a spellbinding page-turner about a crime in a small town that exposes long-held secrets and betrayals among a group of lifelong friends.
When Tyler Sinclair left Stone Mountain at eighteen, he had no plans of returning. With only a duffel bag full of clothes, a few bucks stolen from his father’s dresser, and a guitar, his most prized possession, Tyler disappeared without so much as a goodbye. Eighteen years later, Tyler, now the frontman of a famous band aptly named Stone Mountain, finds himself returning to his hometown for a one-night-only benefit concert to support his old friend, Doc, who lost feeling in his legs following a childhood accident. As Tyler ascends the mountain, memories of his childhood come rushing back—memories of his abusive father and despondent mother, of the friends he left behind—and he quickly learns that, for many people on Stone Mountain, the past does not feel like so long ago, and not everyone has been eagerly awaiting Tyler’s return.
At the concert, resentment simmers just beneath the surface, and Tyler finds himself confronted with faces new and old: there’s Curt, Tyler’s childhood best friend, now Stone Mountain’s chief of police, and his star officer, Deb, an out-of-towner who may have bitten off more than she can chew by accepting a job in Stone Mountain. And then there’s Freddi, Curt’s wife and Tyler’s former lover, a woman whose questionable dealings and fraught history with Tyler will become the catalyst for a tragedy that will upend each of their lives and threaten to validate Tyler’s worst fear: that “Stone Mountain is the kind of place you might escape from once, if you’re lucky, but not twice.”
Under the Falls is at once a propulsive thriller, a gut-wrenching portrait of a tight-knit rural community undone by the sins of its past, and an unflinchingly honest depiction of how porous the line between right and wrong, good versus evil, can become. This is a stunning, deeply empathetic novel, one that takes Russo’s penchant for character-driven drama to thrilling new heights.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This gripping and grounded tale of friendship and self-delusion takes place in rough-and-tumble Stone Mountain, N.Y., a small town in the Adirondacks that's less like its upscale, tourist-destination neighbors and more like the Rust Belt communities Russo portrayed in his early novels such as Mohawk. Tyler Sinclair, frontman of famous rock band Stone Mountain and the only native who made something of himself, is returning for the first time in 20 years to kick off the group's latest tour with a fundraiser for a local man, Tim "Doc" Dockery, who was paralyzed below the waist in a swimming accident that Tyler and his best friend, Curt, now the town's police chief, witnessed when they were teens. In Tyler's mind, the reason he left at 18 was because Curt's girlfriend and now wife, Freddi, was in love with him, and he didn't want Freddi to leave Curt. Curt, meanwhile, told himself the same thing. As the narrative unfolds, it emerges that at least one of the main characters is responsible for running opioids into town, and Curt and Tyler face their respective naivety and narcissism to reckon with the real reason behind Tyler's flight. In between action sequences, including a deadly high-speed chase and a shoot-out in an abandoned church, Russo probes the flawed and soul-searching characters of the two men and finds the meaning of their lifelong bond. It's a memorable literary thriller.
