Dry Bones in the Valley (2014) by Tim Bouman

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Dry Bones in the Valley (2014)

by Tim Bouman

Susquehanna Municipality, Franklin Forks, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania: 5/27

  Dry Bones in the Valley is another regional police procedural set in the Pennstucky, i.e. the Pennsylvania Appalachians.   Unlike the Amish-country set snoozer from yesterday,  Dry Bones in the Valley is more interesting, if only because of the frequent and animated presence of guns, gun fire and gun play on nearly every page.  It turns out the people in this part of the country really like their guns.  All kind of guns- pistols, rifles and even muzzle loaded muskets, which play an important part in unravelling one of the two murders that must be solved.

   Bouman does an excellent job of evoking this unfamiliar (to me, anyway) part of the country, with plenty of well described walks in different landscapes. There isn't a great deal of tension that the murder victim remains a john doe up until the case is actually solved, which guts many of the emotions a reader might invest in a book of this genre.  There is very little building of the case and then the solving at the end reads like something out of an Encyclopedia Brown book, but still, I did enjoy this relative to other examples of detective fiction in the 1,001 Novels project.