B O O K   R E V I E W

Maine Coast Mystery

by Paul Molyneaux

Of Sea and Cloud
By Jon Keller
Tyrus Books, 328 pages

Jon Keller’s thriller novel, Of Sea and Cloud, tells a story of murder and redemption on the Maine coast, and, pun intended, I found myself swept away with the first stroke of the oar by the doomed and aptly named lobsterman, Nicholas Graves. Keller’s studied depiction of Graves rowing out to his boat in the fog felt so accurate and compelling that I couldn’t put the book down. I read it one long, rainy day.

Keller, who came to Maine from out west some years ago and pestered the lobstermen of Addison until one unsuspecting soul took him aboard as sternman, obviously has a keen ear. Anyone from the coast of Maine will recognize his cast of familiar characters. All Keller does is change the names and throw in a murder and every other deadly sin committed in fishing villages from Kittery to Quoddy Head. The author shuns quotation marks, but he doesn’t need them. The dialogue of his characters is so real I have to wonder if Keller secretly taped some of it when the unsuspecting people of Addison took him into their midst. The story is set in winter, and Keller’s descriptions of fishing, food and culture of Downeast Maine leave no doubt that he has been there, and paid attention.

As in every good mystery, the reader knows far more about what is going on than any of the characters. But Keller conceals what exactly has happened to Nicholas Graves, while deftly unraveling an equally compelling story of social and economic tension in a mythical fishing village. When the avaricious Osmond Randolph and his sexually dysfunctional, super-macho grandson, Julius Wesley, challenge the deeply flawed, essentially good sons of Nicholas Graves and their mentor, Virgil Alley, for lobster grounds and the girl, Keller captures the passive-aggressive and sometimes violently aggressive struggles common in any fishing community. He uses this vehicle to illuminate bigger problems facing these communities as they strive to endure in the face of changing markets, globalization, and shifting values among their young people.

This is the true beauty of Keller’s book, the raw reality he portrays as the context for a whodunit murder mystery becomes the real story. The subplots around sex, money, and power are the ones that ring true to any reader, and these drive the narrative more than unlikely appearance of Nicholas Graves’s skull in an unlikely place.

Keller draws on many true incidents familiar to Downeast fishermen, including the hauls of hashish that came aboard a few boats in the 1980s. In fact, so much of this book seems lifted directly from real life that when we get to the sex scenes, and there are plenty of them, I have to wonder what kind of life the author lives. If this book ever gets made into a movie there will be plenty of eye candy, and nothing for feminists. In Keller’s book, the only woman in it who isn’t a sex object is Virgil Alley’s middle-aged wife. And the count of swear words per page? Well… it’s nothing you haven’t heard before.

While I have few complaints about this book—the writing sings, the cover design is attractive, the plot intriguing—I would say it could have benefitted from some tighter editing.

It’s stuff most people reading for pleasure would hardly notice: the overuse of certain words and phrasing. There seems to be lots of piling up, for instance. Waves pile up, and boats pile up on waves, and breath piles up and traps pile up. It’s a word Keller seems stuck on. He also overuses tropes such as hot breath in ears and on necks, and bodies shot through with emotion, shot through with feeling. Top-notch writers, and Keller is one, still sometimes miss things. That’s why they have editors.

And Keller does stretch his credibility a bit when he asks readers to believe that secrets could be kept so well among lobstermen and fishwives. But by the time he wraps you in the web of his fine prose, readers might be willing to forgive Keller a couple of sins of his own.

All in all, Of Sea and Cloud makes an excellent read that I highly recommend.