Critical praise for
Chillwater Cove
"A troubling account of social forces that have been in conflict in the American South for two centuries or more and remain in conflict today...the pace is fast and the prose often tasty....Lakeman is trying, with some passion, to speak the truth about a region that arouses his love, his anger and his sorrow."
– Patrick Anderson, Washington Post
"Lakeman follows up his well-received debut The Shadow Catchers with another dark tale of evil lurking under the peaceful surface of a rural community. The first novel's central character, Mike Yeager, gives up center stage to his partner, FBI Agent Peggy Jean Weaver. I enjoyed the laconic Mike in Shadow Catchers but I think I like the kick-ass, take-names Peggy even more. People constantly assume they can best her and they're constantly wrong. Lakeman gives us a layered story that combines Agent Weaver's unresolved family tensions; childhood issues surrounding the abduction; increasing evidence of a connection between her father and the abductor; the uneasy interaction of town and gown; a legacy of racial injustice that still reverberates; and enough FBI action to satisfy any fan of police procedurals. The cop-talk feels authentic but avoids the dryness that sometimes kills a story. Lakeman always shows us the humanity of the people using the jargon and following the protocols."
– Salem MacKnee, Charlotte Observer
"Mobile native Thomas Lakeman delivers another addictive thriller in the same addictive manner he used in last year’s The Shadow Catchers. Using many of the same elements from his first book, Lakeman once again grabs us by our throats. His dialogue remains as sharp as ever, and this time he’s on native soil."
– Steve Whitton, Anniston Star
"In his second novel, Thomas Lakeman takes a calculated risk that pays off with an atmospheric, action-filled story...[turning] his attention in Chillwater Cove to his hero's partner, FBI agent Peggy Weaver. As he did in his debut, Lakeman illustrates his strong talent for capturing the ennui and insulated nature of a small town — and takes these one further step depicting the Cove. Lakeman's well-rounded depiction of the Cove residents never stoops to Deliverance cliches. Realistic characters inhabit Chillwater Cove — the intelligent and rational Peggy, her bombastic father who has a reason for hiding his emotions, an ambitious FBI agent and a force that is pure evil. Many dark corners fill Chillwater Cove, even when the sun seems to be shining."
– Oline Cogdill, Florida Sun-Sentinel
"I'm so excited to have a dazzling new writer to tell you about that now, having had a nap to catch up on all the sleep he made me miss, I will. Thomas Lakeman made his debut last year with the impressive The Shadow Catchers and solidifies his promise this year with Chillwater Cove. Two elements elevate Lakeman. First, he gets the characters right. They're complex (Yeager and Weaver have a past), they're varied, and they're believable the minute they open their mouths. From the waitress at a diner to a grown woman trying to pretend she was never abused, Lakeman creates people so real, you either want to save them, sleep with them or send them to prison. Second, Lakeman makes you turn the pages. The end of each short (but not insultingly so) chapter compels you to think, 'OK, just one more.' It's a gift similar to Dan Brown's, but unlike Brown, Lakeman can really write, not simply plot. Pick up these books when you have time to keep reading, or at least to sneak a nap later."
– Michele Ross, Cleveland Plain Dealer
"The author draws readers into a story so terrible and so action-packed that they cannot put it down. Teens who like James Patterson and Dean Koontz will eat this one up. Give it to students who “don’t like to read” and watch them reconsider that statement."
– Ellen Bell, School Library Journal
"This mystery has so many twists and turns that there is almost no way to predict the end. Lakeman pulls it off wonderfully."
– Becky LeJeune, Bookbitch.com
"A gripping, edge-of-the-seat tale of suspense."
– Library Journal
"Rich atmosphere, an intriguing plot and a solid heroine make this one another winner for Lakeman."
–Publishers Weekly
"Lakeman's second...is blessed with feisty, fearless Special Agent Peg, who kick-starts the action whenever she has to."
– Kirkus Reviews
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Full text of Washington Post review:
The South Shall Writhe Again
By Patrick Anderson
Monday, December 17, 2007; Page C08
CHILLWATER COVE
By Thomas Lakeman
St. Martin's Minotaur. 325 pp. $24.95
Quite a few novels reviewed here recently have been political in one way or another. Jo Nesbo's "The Redbreast" concerns fascists in Norway. Eliot Pattison's "Prayer of the Dragon" dramatizes Chinese repression in Tibet. Richard Kunzmann's "Salamander Cotton" recalls South African apartheid. Robert Harris's "The Ghost" scrutinizes an English prime minister much like Tony Blair. For all these writers, a crime story opened the door to a larger world of political corruption.
At first, Thomas Lakeman's second novel, "Chillwater Cove," does not seem to fit this pattern. It appears to be yet another account of a sexy but intrepid female FBI agent in pursuit of a serial killer. That is the spine of Lakeman's story, but his novel slowly becomes more than that: a troubling account of social forces that have been in conflict in the American South for two centuries or more and remain in conflict today.
Lakeman sets his story around the fictional Avalon University in Tennessee. The author is an Alabaman who graduated from the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tenn., and his Avalon strongly resembles Sewanee in its physical beauty, its isolation on a mountaintop and its "aloofness from the modern world." Whether Lakeman considers his alma mater to be as dark and dangerous as his fictional Avalon, I cannot say, but the latter is definitely not where you'd send your offspring to pursue the good, the true and the beautiful.
FBI Special Agent Peggy Weaver grew up in Avalon and attended the university. Her father, Rusty Weaver, is the town's grizzled old police chief. When Peggy was a girl, she and her best friend, Samantha, were accosted by a man while walking in the woods. Peggy escaped, but Samantha was captured and sexually abused before being freed. Now, as an adult, Samantha vanishes from her home, possibly abducted by the same man, and Peggy must find her. She is soon caught up in a mystery as impenetrable as the woods that surround the university for miles in every direction.
The novel's conflicts involve three groups. First are the moneyed whites who control the university. They are represented by Samantha's father, Harrison Stallworth, the university's president; his ancestor, the Confederate general who founded it; and her husband, who is slated to be its next president. All of these stalwart gentlemen prove, upon examination, to be less than sterling characters, and the students we meet are mostly sex-crazed cretins. So much for the Southern aristocracy.
Samantha, before her second abduction, had been researching a book about the history of Avalon, and had made contact with the Melungeons, a tribe of mixed white, African and Native American ancestry that has lived in the forest nearby since 1600. Indeed, those who survive believe Avalon Mountain is rightfully theirs. The third group is the poor whites who have long rallied to the Ku Klux Klan and lynch mobs to keep down the Melungeons and other nonwhites. The novel's chief villain is a psychopathic Southern racist, and there isn't much doubt that at some point Peggy will fall into his sadistic clutches.
In the meantime, she has her hands full trying to sort out all the potential villains lurking about. Samantha's handsome husband is a sneaky devil; Peggy's own father, the police chief, is not much better; and even her FBI boss may be a crook. This is a novel in which people die in surprising ways -- from snake venom, rocket-propelled grenades, mysterious explosions -- miraculously escape near-certain death and prove to have unexpected parentage. At times I grew impatient with the bizarre plot twists, but I came to accept them, even to enjoy their ingenuity. It helped that the pace is fast and the prose often tasty. One Southern charmer, seeing that Peggy's glass of bourbon is too strong for her, asks, "Would you like some water on that?" -- "on," not "in," which is just right.
As I neared the end of "Chillwater Cove," I came to think that Lakeman was dealing less in literal truth than in the mythology of the South. He wants to remind us how educated whites have for centuries divided and kept down both the poor whites and people of color. In one brutal flashback, he shows a gang of racists raping, torturing and murdering scores of Melungeons. Elsewhere, we see the subtler, more or less legal ways the poor are kept in their place by laws, deeds and contracts.
While I was reading this book, I went to the Kennedy Center and saw the trumpeter Terence Blanchard perform the music he composed for "When the Levees Broke," Spike Lee's documentary on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. It was clear that Blanchard was pouring his soul into music that meant everything to him. I think it's easier to approach perfection in music than in fiction, and "Chillwater Cove" is far from a perfect novel, but Lakeman is also trying, with some passion, to speak the truth about a region that arouses his love, his anger and his sorrow.
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Full text of Anniston Star review:
Mobile native Thomas Lakeman delivers another addictive thriller in the same addictive manner he used in last year’s The Shadow Catchers. Using many of the same elements from his first book, Lakeman once again grabs us by our throats. His dialogue remains as sharp as ever, and this time he’s on native soil.
In The Shadow Catchers Special Agent Mike Yeager, whose ability to “look at” pictures is invaluable to his superiors at the FBI, is aided by Peggy Weaver, his boss and lover, who keeps the FBI at bay as Yeager methodically works his way through a labyrinthine child-kidnapping while he’s on vacation in Nevada.
Chillwater Cove, however, belongs to Peggy, who has returned to Avalon, the small town in which she grew up, nestled Tennessee’s Cumberland Valley. It’s a bittersweet return, for Avalon does not hold many warm memories. A quarter-century ago, ten-year-old Peggy and her best friend Samantha were approached by a strange man who made off with Samantha while Peggy ran away. The kidnapper was never caught, even though Samantha was eventually found. Since then she has refused to talk about what happened.
Photographs of the kidnapped Samantha surface among the papers of Peggy’s current case. Peggy knows this isn’t just coincidence and senses that what happened 25 years ago won’t be put to rest until she returns to Avalon and Avalon College where Samantha now teaches. Soon after Peggy’s return, however, Samantha is once again abducted.
Although the setting of the new novel is different from that of the last, we remain in familiar Lakeman territory: the present firmly rooted in the past, horrific small-town secrets that small-town officials could be protecting, land speculation, child kidnapping.
Only this time it’s personal. Peggy is not the outsider that Mike was in the previous novel. She knows the environment she’s stepping into; so there’s no learning curve. That fact, alone, increases the tension page after page, for we realize that, even in her home town, Peggy has no comfort zone—except for her phone calls to Mike.
Avalon runs rampant with fearsome characters, and Samantha’s family contains many of them. Her father Harrison Stallworth is, perhaps reluctantly, stepping down as Avalon College’s President. Samantha’s husband Sean Aldridge, scion of a prominent Avalon family, has his eye on that presidency—and on the land surrounding the college. Their young son Caden, just learning to talk, is more observant that he ought to be.
In Chillwater Cove, half-caste Melungeons struggle to keep their culture alive. They are desperately trying to protect what is left of a heritage that others want to eradicate. Peggy will eventually discover a connection to them that is a shattering revelation for her and for us.
There is old Tidwell who knows too much about what happened all those years ago. Most terrifyingly, there’s Kevin Slayton, a white supremacist whose cause, called Krypteia, has him eager to keep the past alive.
At the book’s center is Peggy’s family. Her mother Beatrice spends her days clouded in her ongoing dementia. Her father Rusty is Avalon’s police chief, a man who continues to teach his daughter to survive even as he remains more connected to the two kidnappings than he’d like.
All this coalesces in a climax almost unbearable in what it says about human self-righteousness. Thank goodness Peggy Weaver and Mike Yeager are halves of Thomas Lakeman’s moral compass. Like its predecessor, Chillwater Cove makes us long for their next case and the reassurance that comes with knowing they are on our side.
Steven Whitton is a Professor of English at Jacksonville State University.
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