Let’s get the bad news about THE DEVIL AND THE RIVER out of the way before we get to the good news. Ellory, who is an unheralded master of thriller and mystery fiction, gets in his own way too much and too often here.

One of Elmore Leonard’s rules of writing was to edit out everything that reads like writing. If Ellory had followed that rule in his latest effort, it would be about a hundred pages shorter. It’s not that those pages are poorly written. In some instances, they contain some of his finest and most haunting prose. It’s just that Ellory sometimes tends to veer off of his story’s carefully constructed road and into a wondrous and beautiful ditch before getting the wheels back on the macadam. As a result, the reader is tempted, at various points, to grab the wheel and set the story back on course. That said, Ellory eventually gets to where he is going, and to marked and chilling effect.

"THE DEVIL AND THE RIVER contains some of Ellory’s best writing. While he may meander here and there from the fascinating and addicting story he has created, one is compelled to follow him and keep reading, simply to find out what happens next."

THE DEVIL AND THE RIVER is set primarily in 1974 in the fictional southwest Mississippi town of Whytesburg, near the Louisiana border. John Gaines, newly returned from military service in Vietnam, finds himself appointed sheriff of Breed County. He gets his baptism by fire when the body of a young woman who has been missing for 20 years is discovered buried in a riverbank. The victim is 16-year-old Nancy Denton. While her body is almost perfectly preserved, it has been ritualistically desecrated in a particularly disturbing manner. Gaines is haunted by the discovery but is quickly able to locate a suspect who at first admits to the desecration but vehemently denies the murder. His newness on the job and rush to judgment results in a procedural error that threatens the potential prosecution of the suspect.

That is the least of Gaines’ problems, though. The unearthing of Nancy’s body sets off a chain reaction of murders, deaths and grisly discoveries that seem aimed at, or at least connected to, Gaines himself. The instigator of all of them appears to be the scion of a wealthy family who was friends with Nancy at the time of her disappearance and has interjected himself into the investigation. His denial of any knowledge of what occurred in the past and present is delivered with an unspoken wink and nod that belie his verbal assertions. Gaines is determined to bring him down, but is haunted by his own experiences, including a lost love and his traumatic time in Vietnam. To discover what happened to Nancy, Gaines will have to uncover many other truths concerning not only what occurred all those years ago in a small Mississippi town but also those of his own past. He may not survive either endeavor.

THE DEVIL AND THE RIVER contains some of Ellory’s best writing. While he may meander here and there from the fascinating and addicting story he has created, one is compelled to follow him and keep reading, simply to find out what happens next. And while I would not reflexively refer newcomers of Ellory’s fiction to this book, those familiar with his work will find much to love here --- with a bit of reading fortitude.