B K Mayo, The Water Tower Club

I've been thinking again about The Water Tower Club (2019), which was published earlier this month. It's already had a pretty good reception from Amazon reviewers, and is a Kindle bargain at only $5.99. Robert (BK Mayo) told me he actually gets more royalties from the Kindle purchases than the paperbacks, which sell for $14.95, but when it was published I still bought a paperback for my library. There's just something about having the physical copy, something substantial and validating, proof that one of my best friends from high school is now publishing novels, and very good novels at that.

A few year's ago, when I discovered Robert's first book, Tamara's Child (2011), I was surprised by how good it was, despite knowing it had already won awards. His new novel is different, but just as compelling. Mayo has a knack for telling stories that seem to grow naturally from the complications of ordinary life. While his characters are struggling with the problems that arise as they are trying to find their way, the seeds of his plots are planted and begin to grow into the story that is now unfolding. This is especially true for Darryl Coombs, the rather reluctant hero of The Water Tower Club. From the first page, the opening sentence, Darryl can't believe the news he's just received that his younger sister has been arrested for attempted murder back in his hometown of Grotin, Kansas. Darryl has spent the last decade fleeing Grotin, but not just fleeing, more like suppressing his memories of what we eventually learn was a traumatic childhood. Now he has made a new life for himself in San Antonio, Texas, working as a successful accountant and dating a beautiful and equally private young woman who is also a co-worker. The last thing he wants to do is return to Grotin and have to confront his mother and recollections of a childhood he has been trying not just to escape but to bury.

This much we learn very quickly. Darryl is no private investigator. He has no desire or motivation to stick his nose into the mystery that surrounds his sister's arrest, other than his love for her and a nagging sense of guilt for having left her behind when he fled Grotin. But from this seed the story grows with a compelling inevitability; Darryl is drawn further and further into the something rotten lying at the heart of his hometown. The way Mayo describes Grotin itself is masterful. This sleepy little town seems to be stuck somewhere in the last century, but references to laptops, cell phones, and wind farms remind us that the Grotin of Darryl's past is now very much a part of his and his sister's present. Darryl notices that not much has changed, except the kids he went to school with are now grown up and, with few exceptions, not particularly pleased to see him return.

There's a lot about this mystery novel that subverts the usual expectations of the genre. There doesn't even appear to be a murder. And as I said, Darryl is at best only a reluctant investigator. But driven by his desire to get to the bottom of his sister's seemingly unprovoked attack on one of the town's commissioners during a town meeting, all captured live on closed circuit TV and recorded on DVD, he starts looking for answers. And the more he learns, the more he remembers about his own childhood. One of his tormentors, Bobby Hobson, is now the commissioner that his sister has stabbed with a fingernail file in full view of the camera and the audience attending the meeting. Darryl remembers Bobby all too well, and his memories are anything but pleasant ones. Gradually he begins to realize that there is something very awful his sister is trying to keep from him, but it turns out to be even more complicated than he imagines. As with Tamara's Child, the moral dislocations and transgressions that lie at the center of The Water Tower Club are both distressing and familiar. And once Darryl begins to confront them in the present, he discovers he has found the moral courage to confront them in his own past as well. But his newfound compulsion to be open with himself about his past brings further complications and leads to more painful truth telling than he anticipated.

Well, as I said, this is a very good book, and a very well written one. I'm still in awe of these two fine novels that my friend Robert has written. I know how hard he works at his craft, and how much earned knowledge about life and writing has gone into these novels. I hope he will write more, and I hope he'll continue to find readers who enjoy his work.