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Cyanide Wells, Marcia Muller, Mysterious Press, $7.50.

(Warning: this review contains a slight spoiler).

Marcia Muller has been forgoing Sharon McCone in favor of this new series set in Soledad County, California, and featuring loosely interwoven characters (think Sharyn McCrumb's Appalachian series to get the idea). This is a follow up to the very strong Point Deception, but only tangentially including Deputy Rhoda Swift, the main character of that novel. Instead, this book focuses on three characters, only two of whom are actually present - Jeff, whose wife has disapperared years earlier, leaving Jeff to deal with the suspicion that he killed her and forcing him to start a new life in another town; and Carly, an editor of a newspaper in a small town called Cyanide Wells.

In true mysterious fashion, Jeff gets an anonymous call that his wife, Gwen, is not dead but alive in another town - Cyanide Wells. Jeff ties up the loose ends of his life as a tourist boat owner and leaves town to find Gwen and hopefully get a job as a photographer on the Cyanide Wells newspaper - a paper somewhat notorious for having won a Pulitzer for a series on the murders of a gay couple by a local reporter named Ardis Coleman. The central character in the lives of both Carly and Jeff - of course - turns out to be the same person - but Muller offers no simple solution to a complex situation. To Jeff, she's Gwen, the wife who left for no reason; to Carly, she's Ardis, a writer, partner, and mother to their child, Natalie. However, both Natalie and Ardis disappear in short order, leaving Jeff and Carly to sort out the mess.

The specter of Gwen/Ardis haunts the entire novel, leaving the reader nearly as anxious as Jeff and Carly to know this woman better, to know what's motivated her, and to understand the two lives she's led. In the prologue Jeff notes that most people have one, linear life - but I think, that like Jeff, Carly, and Gwen/Ardis, in America, lots of people have multiple, non-linear lives. Muller proves she's a master as she balances character study and a truly mysterious situation with a complex plot that's told in a clear and concise voice that never leaves you, as reader, panting to catch up or confused. She makes it look so easy - only the truly great ones can do that. Settle in for one of the better reads of the year.

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