Title: A Farmhouse in the Rain
Author: Joe Kilgore
Publisher: Top Hat Books
ISBN: 978-1-78535-434-2
Pages: 395
Genre: Fiction
Reviewed by: Barbara Bamberger Scott
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Three men bond in time of war, but their friendship is fractured by a bizarre and heinous crime that no one will admit to, however one of them must have committed.
Riley is a rural west Texas kid getting deeply involved with his girlfriend, Gwen, when he receives a letter from the draft board in 1943. Brendon, a cocky Chicago boy delving into petty crime, is suddenly forced to choose between two equally unattractive alternatives: prison or the army. Paul is the scion of an upper-class family who could dodge military service but enlists to find a higher purpose for his privileged life. Riley and Brendon meet in boot camp and quickly become buddies. Later, observing Paul in training as an officer and learning that he’s going to paratrooper school, they decide to follow him. Back home, Gwen is in Hollywood developing into a potential film star; Brendon’s almost-girlfriend, Jillian, has become a target for the unsavory characters he once hung out with; and fate brings Paul’s blue-blood parents into contact with Gwen. The stage is set for dramatic homecomings–if the three young men make it back.
The trio winds up in France in the thick of the Normandy invasion, proving their heroism amidst the gruesome horrors of war. One grim night, with Paul badly wounded, they hole up in a remote farmhouse with Colette, a diffident but attractive Frenchwoman, as their hostess. They awake to a macabre scene—Colette has been brutally raped and murdered. One of them is surely to blame. But which one?
Stateside, the three go separate ways, unaware that they are being stalked, not only by someone set on revenge for the French woman’s death, but by a sinister figure with delusions of personal empire. As love and violence exact their toll, Riley, Brendon and Paul will be linked again.
A complicated interweaving of lives and intentions, A Farmhouse in the Rain is the latest literary creation by author Joe Kilgore. Craftsman Kilgore is as comfortable penning scenes of the grim realities of combat as of the tenderness of long awaited love, from the glamour of Hollywood to the rigors of boot camp to the loneliness of Texas back roads tracking villains so scurrilous you will want them to die twice. A former paratrooper with a lifelong fascination for World War II, Kilgore creates especially vivid descriptions of leaping out of an airplane with nothing but a swath of silk for support: “The breeze cooled his face and he floated like a winged bird on an updraft. This was the closest thing to flight that man would ever know.” At every moment in this romance and action laden mystery, you know that capable hands are at the wheel, steering the tale down many side trails but always back to the central question: Who killed Colette?
With a sophisticated storyline and characters that bring it to life, A Farmhouse in the Rain is a well-mapped, well-managed mystery.
