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Tanner, a lawyer turned private investigator in San Francisco, has come back home to settle the future of the family farm with his nonfarming siblings. The 320-acre spread is coveted by a clutch of corporations, and the family is divided on whether to sell. The only kinsman making real money from the acreage is Tanner's nephew Billy, raising bumper crops of marijuana on the back 40. An embittered Viet Nam veteran and victim of dioxin burns, Billy has succeeded in exposing several of Chaldea's leading villains. When he is found hanging from a tree, town and family are only too happy to accept the official verdict of suicide. Tanner is convinced his nephew was murdered.
Before settling the case and putting Chaldea in the rear-view mirror once more, the doughty private investigator rediscovers an old love, uncovers some long-suppressed secrets, and puts Billy's pregnant lady on the road to social security. Things occur without apparent order but with the haphazard blur of ripening crops and turning leaves, as Midwest-raised Author Stephen Greenleaf knows they should. As for Investigator Tanner, in his fourth fictional appearance, he is once again the small-town boy making good, and better, and better.
THE LIGHT OF THE HOME by Harvey Green Pantheon; 205 pages; $18.95
In America's Victorian homes, even the furniture functioned to keep sensual passion at bay. "Celebrated physicians have condemned the double bed," warned a crusader for moral and physical hygiene in the 1890s. "The air which surrounds the body under the bed clothing is exceedingly impure, being impregnated with the poisonous substances which have escaped through the pores of the skin." Similarly, parlor chairs were designed to keep the sexes separate and unequal. The gentlemen's chairs were "akin to thrones," according to this diverting account of everyday life in the Victorian era. While men sat back comfortably in their high-backed chairs equipped with arm rests, women were confined to smaller, armless models that encouraged the proper posture: upright, away from the chair back, hands modestly folded on the lap.
Delightfully illustrated with pictures of artifacts from the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum in Rochester, The Light of the Home illuminates the deadening burden that male supremacy imposed during the 19th century. Throughout Historian Harvey Green's lively text, advertisements, advice columns, how-to manuals and diaries kept by women of the period attest to an oppressed existence, all too often foreshortened by death from childbirth. Small wonder that Victorian women ingested vast quantities of alcohol and opium patent medicines. Inveighing against these tranquilizers of the age, one physician declared, "Their manufacturers are deserving of a place in the deepest part of the bottomless pit." His foresight is an astonishment; Green's hindsight is an education.
WESTERING MAN by Bil Gilbert Atheneum; 339 pages; $17.95