Customer Reviews

Blue Ridge

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Seven years is a long time to wait for a new book from a favorite author, but T.R. Pearson is worth that much time and more. His last novel, "Cry Me a River," appeared in 1993, and represented a sharp break in style from his earlier novels (especially the Neeley trilogy.) "River" surprised readers by using the framework of a crime novel to tell a story of human loss and longing.

In "Blue Ridge," Pearson once again uses the crime novel to muse on the human heart, although he far exceeds the requirements of the genre in his flawless and witty writing and his thoughtfully realized characters.

The story is divided into two parts: Ray Tatum, the newest member of the Hogarth, VA., Sheriff's department, must get to know his new neighbors the hard way: by discovering if one of them is a killer. Meanwhile, his cousin Paul, an actuary, travels to New York City to identify the remains of the illegitimate son he hardly knew.

Ray's story is told in the third person, with the narrative point-of-view occasionally shared by Park Ranger Kit Carson. Paul speaks for himself, narrating events that grow increasingly far-removed from his tidy actuarial world.

The two stories never intersect, but they share the theme of identity and belonging (or not-belonging.) The two murders are solved, as the genre seems to require, although traditional crime fans might find the solutions unsettling. But, as in any Pearson book, the pleasure is in the journey, not the arrival.

After waiting for what seemed like forever, my life has been blessed with a new work from T. R. Pearson!

Once again, I was able to curl up and visit with the good Southern people of my heritage. Mr. Pearson's grasp of eating, speaking and BEING Southern has once again left this Georgia boy (now in the north) yearning for a good cup of chicory coffee laced with a hefty dollop of gossip. Pearson sets the standard by which I judge all other contemporary Southern novelists...and usually find them lacking.

If you're from the South, or were raised by Southerners, this book is for you. If you're from the North, read this one anyway...it will further your education! :-)

this was my first t.r. pearson novel, and i enjoyed it very much. it was well paced, with engaging characters, on-the-money observations about pop culture, laugh-out-loud humor and enough drama and mystery to keep me reading to find out what happened. on the other hand, as murder mysteries go, i couldn't help thinking over and over how this book couldn't match any of the four novels by colin harrison. compared to harrison's books, the stories were shallow, the characters weakly drawn and the motivations obvious.

This is only the second book I have read by Mr. Pearson, the other was, "Polar", and it happens they share many of the same players. Had I known, I would have read them in order, but they both stand on their own, and both are extremely well done.

My impression was this author portrayed small towns and the wildly colorful on the edge characters they contain. In this book he shifts from a rural venue to the ultimate urban setting of New York City repeatedly without pause or misstep. There is commonality between the two protagonists as well as the experience of unwinding two separate homicides. The killings, the reactions they cause, their investigations, and eventual resolutions are not only the common focal point but also the means by which the author defines two very different communities, two very different ways of life. In both settings a life can be taken for little thought or consideration, whether for a perceived sleight, or a business deal gone askew.

In NYC there are viewing rooms for the living to identify the dead, when what amounts to a skeleton is found much further south on The Appalachian Trail, the remains are ferried in the trunk of a cruiser within a plastic bag. The author takes a familiar situation and puts it on the other side of the glass. The death of a child is devastating to a parent, but what is it when the child is the result of an impulse, when the child never becomes more than a picture of a toddler in a wallet? What fundamental ties are there, if any, between a parent and their child regardless of time or seeming indifference?

To date I have read and very much enjoyed both of the works I have read by this author, and I plan on working through the other 5.

This was one great read, I am definitely going to check out Mr. Pearson's other books! "Blue Ridge" is really two stories alternating. One involves a new deputy sheriff investigating a death with the help of a high-string (female) park ranger near the Appalachin Trail in Virginia. (Right here the book had me, because these circumstances echoed the works of Bill Bryson and the transcendent Sharyn McCrumb.) The other story concerns a man who is summoned to New York City to identify what is supposed to be the body of his murdered son, whom he had never met. This man is visited by some very bad, yet elegant and polite, people who the dead son was involved with. The man is taken on a sort of tour of the city, much against his will, and there is some real suspense as to what the outcome of this trip will be. Mr. Pearson writes in such a whimsical and lyrical way, you can just hear the people speaking. I love his description of the deputy's aunt, a terrible cook, who expects him for dinner every week. Of the two stories, the New York story is more involving . The deputy's story is flavorful but not so involving, becoming more of a feisty romance. I highly recommend this wonderful novel, you will find yourself re-reading descriptive sentences over and over for the sheer pleasure of reading!

T. R. Pearson departs the style that made him a favorite of mine, reminiscent of sitting on a porch with a glass of tea, listening to a series of raconteurs spinning yarns and gossip. His previous books, all set in the same imaginary County, flowed in a honeyed stream, causing more than one bursts of laughter. Now this more conventional yet totally original book has surfaced. And I for one am glad.

You find Pearson's prose to be well observed but basically straightforward. You suspect he has something more literary going on beneath the surface. Eventually, you will get it if not at first.

The "surface" of BLUE RIDGE is comprised of two concurrent, leapfrogging tales. One concerns a sheriff's deputy investigating a murder on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia. The other follows a Roanoke insurance actuary caught in the criminal underground of New York City when summoned to identify the body of an adult son he had not seen since he was a young child. Both strands can be described as genre mysteries with stock characters providing ironic relief--a Parks investigator reminiscent of Christy Love and violent thugs and bungling cops peopling New York. In the end, though, Pearson has said volumes about the two contemporary sons of the south, loners who have had their lives transformed by the loss of children in their respective pasts. Despite the violence, despite the clowning around, there's a quiet heart at work here, one that worries about the rise of chaos, the loss of order and high falutin' things like that.

Blue Ridge was the first book I read by Pearson. I didn't find it funny at all (unlike its sequel, Polar), but he writes beautifully and the characters are wonderful. Read this book, then read Polar, have the full Pearson experience, and you'll be glad you did. Keep in mind that, while well written, Blue Ridge is a very dark, often violent book.

Unlike all the other reviewers before me, I was not awaiting T.R. Pearson's novel, "Blue Ridge". In fact this novel is the first Pearson novel I've read, and I was well pleased. The novel actually consists of 2 stories that are not related, except that they have parallel themes. Ray Tatum joins the Hogarth VA sheriff's department and discovers a skeleton on the Appalachian Trail. He must solve the murder with the help of Kit Carson, a black woman with the park service. His story is told in third person. The other story is about Ray's cousin, Paul, an actuary, who travels from Roanoke to New York City to identify the reamins of an illegitimate son that he fathered back in the 1970's. His story is told in first person with Paul as the narrator. Each is story is captivating, and the characters are all well-drawn. I especially enjoyed the local characters in Hogarth County. Pearson has a gift for rich characters and strong plots. He is a writer that I intend to read again. "Blue Ridge" is an excellent novel.

We're used to reading about lonely women whose lives revolve around the quest for a man. Literary tradition has long dictated that lonely fictional men, on the other hand, be cynically heroic, adventurous, living large lives, and taking large risks because they have nothing to lose.

In Blue Ridge, T.R. Pearson challenges that tradition with a vengeance, giving us two lonely men who wander, lost as six-week-old puppies, through the wastelands of their own lives.

It's not that Ray Tatum and his cousin Paul Tatum don't hold jobs or occupy reasonably respectable homes. They do. It's their private, unspectacular tragedies that make them interesting -- the way they're haunted by past failure, the way they can't get a break from women, and their total failure at heroism.

Paul is an actuary, a job not ordinarily freighted with heroic opportunity. He likes tidy corners and straight sofa cushions. He can't even win the loyalty of the dog he adopted from the pound. Ray's job as deputy sheriff is theoretically more stimulating, but Ray is doomed to sacrifice justice to small town politics. It's tempting to say that Blue Ridge is a seedy, white man's Waiting to Exhale minus the happy ending.

Shaking up this stagnant psychic terrain is Kit, a super competent, beautiful, African-American forest ranger who threatens to steal the whole show with her low tolerance for small town nonsense. Kit is the kind of lady who can break up with her boyfriend long distance and throttle a redneck racist at the same time -- pay phone in one hand, windpipe in the other. The wreck she'll make of Ray's heart is such a foregone conclusion it hurts.

Stylistically, Blue Ridge is a tour de force. Playing on reader expectation, Pearson pens two completely separate story lines (two subplots, if you will) that are brought together only in the last three pages of the book. This means the novel's brilliant cohesion is in debt not to the plot, but to the subtle ways the two men's lives run parallel.