Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

This atmospheric mystery by Tom Franklin was this month's pick (June, 2019) for my mystery book group. This is Franklin's 3rd novel, which received the CWA Gold Dagger Award in 2011 for best crime novel. While some reviewers have called his prose "luminous" (Booklist), I found it evocative, so effectively creating a mood of sweltering, suffocating, ennui and apathy, that you almost start to sweat. If you never wanted to live in the rural deep South, like me, this would remind you of why. The Washington Post notes that this book "makes a haunting demonstration of Faulkner's claim that 'the past is never dead. It's not even past.'"
As a boy, Larry Ott is too nerdy, too interested in books (especially horror stories) and snakes to be the son his father wants. These characteristics don't make him popular at school either in 1970's Chabot, Mississippi. The southern way they teach children to spell the name of the state and the river  is "M-I-crooked letter-crooked letter-I-crooked letter-crooked letter-I-humpback letter-humpback letter-I Really!?) When a black woman and her son move into a primitive cabin on the Ott's land, Larry connects with the boy, Silas, teaching him how to hunt and fish. At school, they barely acknowledge each other, both because black and white do not mix, but also because Silas has gained some stature as the school's star baseball player and Larry is still so uncool. When a popular girl in school asks Larry on a date for the drive-in movies, he is thrilled; only it turns out that she just wants a ride to meet her real boyfriend. Larry, ever accommodating, drops her off at a designated point along the highway and goes on to the movies, pretending Cindy is with him. When he goes back to pick her up, she never shows. In fact, she disappears, and the fact that she had a "date" with Larry that night makes him the prime suspect, even though there is no concrete evidence and no body. Larry and his family are ostracized by the community, driving his father to an early death, his mother into a care home and Larry into the military, where he becomes a mechanic. When he comes home, he takes over his father's old automotive repair shop, but the small town has a long memory and "scary Larry" never get a customer.  He is forced to sell off chunk's of his father's land to the big timber company to make ends meet. Silas went away to college and returns 20 years later to be the town's only policeman. When a 2nd girl goes missing, Larry again becomes the focus of attention, and someone shoots him. Not only does Silas find the dead girl buried in the old cabin where he lived with his mother, but only he knows that Larry was not responsible for Cindy's disappearance decades ago. What he reveals to prove Larry's innocence is going to bring his life down around his ears. It's a heartbreaking book in many ways, but so well written that it's hard to put down, and there is a glimmer of hope in the end.
Not everyone was enamored of this book as the reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly demonstrate. Others, such as the Washington Post, the Guardian, and this interview from NPR are very positive.