Turns out Silas was also involved in Cindy’s disappearance, though absolutely not as her killer. Larry taught Silas how to hunt and fish until a racial slur ended their friendship. Silas and his mother once lived in a hunting cabin in the Ott woods. The result is a sluggish story, a surprise after Franklin’s two hell-for-leather historicals ( Smonk, 2006, etc.). These dramas share space with frequent flashbacks to the childhood of Larry and Silas. Silas has been having a busy day: finding the decomposing body of a local drug dealer (not heard of again), removing a rattlesnake from a mailbox. He survives, thanks to quick thinking by his erstwhile friend Silas Jones, a black man and the town’s only cop. While we’re absorbing this, a masked intruder shoots Larry on his porch. Now, in 2007, another disappearance: the daughter of the company owner. He survived by selling off parcels of the family’s woods to the timber company. When the time came for Larry, a mechanic, to inherit his father’s shop, he had no customers. The town assumed Larry had killed her, so though no body was found, no charges brought, Larry was punished. Back in 1982, the white high-school student took his neighbor Cindy Walker out on a date. Larry Ott has been ostracized by the small town of Chabot for 25 years. There are murders in this Mississippi melodrama, but pay them no mind its core is the brief friendship of two boys, one black, one white.
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