King, Laurie R.: Keeping Watch

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Allen Carmichael was a second-tier character in Laurie King's delightful novel Folly, the story of internationally-renowned woodworker Rae Newborn's attempt to tighten her tenuous hold on reality by building a house on an uninhabited island in Washington State. In Keeping Watch, Allen's character and history are fully fleshed out, from the experiences in Vietnam that ineradicably imprinted themselves on him, to the mission he undertook after the War as a means of quelling his demons: Allen has spent more than 25 years applying his jungle survival skills to the task of rescuing abused children and wives from their abusers, usually by illicit means. When the action of Keeping Watch begins, Allen is in his mid-fifties and is about to retire from the field, but one final case requires his attention first: twelve-year-old Jamie O'Connell lives in terror of his father, whose casual abuse and cruel manipulations have warped the boy beyond measure.

King's exploration of Allen's character is wholly successful, and her depiction of his patrols in the "green" in Vietnam riveting. The contemporary story of Jamie's rescue is equally rewarding, indeed downright engrossing after about page 240, when of a sudden one stops knowing for certain who the bad guys are. Keeping Watch is at least as good as King's novel Folly (a book which also garnered five stars from me, but in my pre-blog era). Familiarity with the earlier book is not at all necessary, but readers of Keeping Watch will almost certainly want to treat themselves to a broader view of the universe Allen Carmichael inhabits once they've finished with King's latest.