The Times Argus & Rutland Herald - Weekend Magazine, December 19-20, 2020
Text of Review
A roiling ‘Inland Sea’ kicks up mayhem
- By Jim Higgins Correspondent
About halfway through Plainfield author Sam Clark’s first mystery novel, “The Inland Sea,” I worked out a second meaning for the beguiling title, this one a metaphor.
The first and literal meaning of the title is illuminating enough. Who knew? In fact, the 40-miles-long body of water sandwiched between mainland Vermont to the east and the North and South Hero islands to the west, is what locals and other savvy Vermonters call the inland sea. Oh yeah, the northern tip of this mysterious “sea” pokes eight miles into Canada.
The second and metaphoric meaning for the title popped into my sluggish brain after I got around to doing what I often told my literature students: to understand what a book or short story is about…mull over the title.
Inland sea, hmm. How about that term in the psychological sense to describe internal turbulence, as in the roiling, mysterious, unstable nature of we mortals, and especially the main characters in this book? I don’t know if Clark had that second meaning in mind when he titled the book, but it works for me.
And, if nothing else, the Inland Sea roils.
Even when it’s iced over. Which is when the murder takes place, in the dead of winter. The killer’s snow machine breaks down on the ice and he stumbles upon an ancient adversary temporarily holed up in a shuttered cabin on Osprey Island, a couple miles offshore from St. Albans.
Clark tips us off quickly on the identity of the killer and the victim. The killer is easy to know, a one-dimensional feckless bully-boy who never grew up. Now, with his wealthy parents dead, he’s inherited their New York house on Lake Champlain, and in middle age makes a comfortable living running methamphetamine from Canada to points south.
The victim is not so easy to know. In fact, readers are the only ones who know his identity since his body was stripped of all identifiers and dumped on the next island over, Burton Island. He was officially a missing local person from 30 years prior and the police work for a month just to ID him.
Clark slowly teases out the dead man’s remarkable “missing” story through the machinations of a clever, near-retirement Vermont State Police detective who grew up on the shores and on the boats of the inland sea.
The colorful, vulnerable, and roiled characters we meet along the way, their family dramas, their failed romances, their career trade-offs to live on the sea, their moments of transcendence, all add juicy flesh to this complex police procedural that unravels just slowly enough to provide several nights of great reading. Best of all, it all leads to a truly satisfying guns and roses climax.
This is Clark’s first novel (he has written two other books on design and building) and the cabinetmaker boldly chose both paths through the yellow wood. The first path is writing about what you know, in his case, boats and the lake. The second path is writing about what you don’t know so much, murder, mayhem, and police investigations. Clark pulled this one off, probably in the murder and mayhem case through his own dogged reading and research that we mystery buffs love.
Clark’s writing is understated, subtle, and peppered with deep insight into the human drama…and the human comedy. This little LOL came from the detective’s childhood buddy as he’s breaking down a boat engine: “People should take better care of these things. I think they forget to read the maintenance schedule where it says ‘Change the grease and repaint the hull every twenty years whether it needs it or not.’ ”
Inland Sea is published by Rootstock Publishing in Montpelier and is available in all bookstores.