Little Wolves

November 12, 2012
Maltman follows his 2007 debut, The Night Birds, with this powerful novel set in 1987 Lone Mountain, Minn. When troubled teen Seth Fallon shoots and kills Sheriff Will Gunderson before committing suicide, Seth’s widowed father, known as Grizz, struggles to understand his son’s actions. Seth’s substitute English teacher, Clara Warren, wife of the local Lutheran pastor, muses over the impending birth of her first child as she recalls the tales her father told her, all centered on an abandoned baby and the wolves who raised it. Seth came to see Clara, though she didn’t answer the door, and she berates herself in hindsight for not preventing what came next. The town’s strange custom of burying all suicide victims in a separate area angers Grizz as he tries to piece together Seth’s life leading up to the shooting, while Clara becomes more obsessed in identifying her deceased mother, who may have once lived in Lone Mountain. Maltman skillfully evokes oppressive smalltown life and the far-reaching consequences of violence. Agent: Laura Langlie, Laura Langlie Agency.

December 1, 2012
A double tragedy opens primordial wounds in an isolated Minnesota community. Everyone always thought that Grizz Fallon's boy, Seth, was no good. At 16, he'd already done drugs and gotten into trouble with the law. But no one ever imagined that he'd get up one Saturday morning, methodically saw the barrel off the 12-gauge shotgun Grizz had given him for Christmas, hide it under an unseasonably heavy coat, ring the doorbell of his pregnant English teacher, Clara Warren, who doesn't answer the door since she's sneaking a cigarette in the basement, and then, when Sheriff Will Gunderson spots him strolling through the center of Lone Mountain in that coat and pulls over his cruiser to talk to him, pull out the shotgun and unload into the sheriff's face. The story, which might seem to end just a few minutes later when Seth shoots himself in a nearby cornfield, continues in two directions. Going forward, an argument about whether Seth will be banished to the corner of the graveyard reserved for suicides leads Grizz to steal his corpse and bury it himself, and the locals are troubled by sightings of the coyote pups Seth had been raising after his father shot mama coyote. Going backward, Clara, who's persuaded her husband, Logan, a Lutheran minister, to accept his first pulpit in this unappealing little town so that she can find out more about the mother her own father would never talk about, links Sylvia Meyers' death to a chain of dark secrets that join saints and sinners, man and beast. Maltman (The Night Birds, 2008) makes his leading characters so sensitive that you may shudder at the same revelations that so appall them.

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August 1, 2012

Maltman follows up his award-winning (and truly terrific) first novel, The Night Birds, with a work set in drought-stricken 1987 Minnesota, as a father anguishes over his son's having committed murder. Smart thrills; look for a reading group guide, book club outreach, and giveaways on Goodreads.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2013
This thought-provoking novel, set in the isolated town of Lone Mountain, Minnesota, explores the roots of violence in disturbing fashion. After teenage Seth Fallon shoots Sheriff Will Gunderson to death and then turns the gun on himself, Seth's father, Grizz, is laid low by his grief. He is especially troubled that the local Lutheran church has a separate section in the cemetery for suicides. Seth's English teacher, Clara Warren, married to the Lutheran minister, had refused to answer the door the day Seth came by, right before his fateful confrontation with the sheriff, and now feels haunted by his ghost as well as the stories her father told her when she was young, stories of a child raised by wolves. Now pregnant with her first child, Clara feels that she is slowly losing it as she begins to think that she may now be living in the town where her mother, in the throes of postpartum depression, died during a snowstorm. In gorgeous prose, Maltman conjures both the irrational suspicion and the heartwarming connections forged in a small town during times of trauma.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)