The brutal summer heat seems to have everyone in Northtown, Ohio on edge.
A high-school reunion is the catalyst for long-held grudges to bubble up to the surface but quickly becomes a sideshow as private detective Raimo Jarvi is drawn into a murderous rampage that extends far beyond his usual remit of unfaithful wives and petty personal disputes.
The total eclipse is coming to Northtown, a small port town on Lake Erie. Raimo "Ray" Jarvi and his brother Rick grew up here. Rick, a football star in high school, never found again the glory he once enjoyed and moved to California, whereas his brother Ray stayed behind. Owing to a fire that scarred his face when he was a boy, Ray lives a reclusive life until he decides to break out and do something with hsi life. Becoming a private investigator sounded like a good idea, but soon Ray discovers threre's little to do or solve being a small-town gumshoe.
Then Rick comes home for his 10-year high-school class reunion and things begin to heat up in more ways than the blazing temperature outside. Something's gnawing at Rick. Ray needs to find out what's behind tha anger and the drinking before his brother self-destructs.
As Ray peels away one onion skin of mystery after another, he discovers Rick's terrible secret and the reason Brian, his brother's former best friend in high school, has put both brothers in the crosshairs. When day turns to night in the total eclipse, Ray Jarvi will be lucky if he sees the light of another day in his hometown.
Excerpt
Ch. 1 - Aug. 1
Visitors to Raimo Jarvi’s office on Bridge Street that morning, had there been any, would have found the temperature uncomfortable. If yesterday was an indicator, daytime heat would proceed from pre-dawn warm through stifling to downright oppressive by noon. Heat like this was unusual for Northern Ohio after mid-July. That typical turn in the morning air as day broke could be felt in the blood and was expected by early August even if residents ignored the calendar.
Everyone knew summer was ending, fall was on the way, and time to get the last vacation plans in. Not this year; just an oppressive, blanketing heat for the past two weeks.
When he bought the two-story building with his trust money, Raimo renovated the upstairs into living space for himself and sealed off the downstairs office with a partition. He was a one-man outfit and he didn’t require more room. Behind his desk the door with the transom window—strictly for architectural effect circa1909—led to nothing. A single row of fluorescent lighting down the center still worked, but the long narrow room contained no furniture except for an old cherry table covered with nicks where old George O’Mullan used to wrap the shoes like a butcher; he’d wrap the box with thick brown paper and tie it off with string unspooled from a cast iron dispenser. Hundreds of empty shoe boxes occupied the shelves against the walls.
Raimo had one memory of the shoe salesman from a visit with his mother before she turned recluse. She brought him to Mr. O’Mullan’s for a new pair of dress shoes for his fourth-grade class Confirmation; O’Mullan’s bald head shone from the same overhead lighting, his navy-blue suit and bone-white shirt were crisply pressed. His voice had an actor’s timbre, not unpleasant but something lurked in the earnest expression, something his mother picked up. While George talked to himself searching among the racks of shoes tiers honeycombed along the wall, he noticed the piles of empty boxes, some with shoes still wrapped in their wax paper, dumped in tiny mounds here and there like some ransacking thief. Without a word to him, his mother snatched his hand and jerked him from the seat and hauled him out of there. She never spoke about it later, but he never forgot the experience. Raimo was free from superstition and didn’t consider it ominous he had acquired the building once occupied by the mad shoe salesman.
Professional Reviews
Hardboiled and Harrowing
Original and inventive, Northtown Eclipse takes the typical crime cliché of a seedy private eye and subverts the standard hardboiled detective story into something significantly more substantial. Author Robb White twists the tropes of the genre to tell a much more meaningful story, one which explores the human condition at its most personal – a troubled relationship between brothers – and on a grander scale, the post-industrial decline of American small-town society.
Robb White obvious revels in his writing; his love of language shines beyond mere storytelling. It’s rare, for instance, that you encounter someone who can inventively apply the word ‘spaghettification’ to emotional distress but White makes it look almost easy. You almost don’t care where the story is going: these are words worth reading in and of themselves.
He creates a tremendous sense of place which vividly brings to life the polluted waterways of lakeside mid-America. Chemical contamination leaves the dead fish washing up on the shore, while the town itself is stifled by industrial stagnation. During the scalding heat of an unrelenting summer, private investigator Ray struggles to make ends meet and to find any meaning in his pretty pitiful existence. He’s hardly a natural detective, and barely scratches a living by grabbing peep-shots of marital infidelity.
Ray is horribly broken; his emotional damage is as crippling as his visible facial scars. His disfigurement isolates him from society; he’s so conditioned to people’s disgust that he lives his sad, lonely life in the shadows, shrinking away from social exposure. His few intimate relationships are fraught; he’s destructively tormented by manipulative lovers who maul what little remains of his self-esteem.
Ray’s failings are brought into sharp relief when he’s compared to his macho, handsome sibling. His brother is physically impressive and superficially successful; yet his flawed life choices drag both of them into a chaotic spiral of intimidation, exploitation, corporate espionage, insider trading, sabotage and – inevitably – cold-blooded murder.
In this meandering narrative, the weak and the foolish are easily abused by the brutes; those high-school bullies who wield casual violence to terrorise their allies and who do far worse to their enemies. The vivid text is layered with real-world significance and it sidesteps almost every anticipated outcome. The scales swing between violent betrayal and emotional indifference as Ray struggles to make sense of a complex conspiracy, and to salvage his failing relationship with his one remaining close relative.
Literary and complex, the narrative of Northtown Eclipse might actually be a bit too convoluted for its own good. I was paying close attention but even I quite literally lost the plot at one point. In truth, by the end of the novel I didn’t really care about the superficial story of greedy men doing bad things. The soul of this story is about Ray’s last chance for redemption. It’s a powerful and poignant accomplishment.
Reviewed by Rowena Hoseason,
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