Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Review: "Bitter Crossing," D.A. Keeley


By Paul Carrier

If Donald Trump is to be believed, the Mexican border is a porous mess, a no man’s land where countless bad guys sneak into the United States to engage in all manner of nasty stuff that is hampering our ability to make America great again.

But what about our other border? You know the one. It’s spread out over more than 5,500 miles, making it the longest international boundary in the world. It rarely makes headlines; even the xenophobic Trump has not proposed building a wall along it.

No one claims that hordes of illegal immigrants are pouring into the United States from Canada. But in Bitter Crossing, a mystery, Maine’s rural border with New Brunswick, a mix of farmland, forest, and small communities, proves to be a convenient entry point for drug smugglers. And worse.

Enter Peyton Cote, a Border Patrol agent newly returned to her native Aroostook County, Maine, after seven years in El Paso, Texas, working the Mexican border. Recently divorced, she now lives with her young son and her mother in the fictional town of Garrett, where she grew up. Tough, smart and dogged, Cote could be described as a perfect agent, if not for her renegade streak.

Cote gets a tip from a local lowlife that a sizable marijuana drop is planned in a Maine potato field, but when she checks the spot on the designated night, what she finds instead is an infant wrapped in a blanket. The baby, which appears to be Hispanic, is placed in a local foster home.

Something even more nefarious than drug trafficking is afoot here. As the investigation progresses, the abandoned baby, nicknamed Autumn because she turned up on a frigid fall night, is kidnapped from foster care. And one of Cote’s fellow agents is shot by an unknown assailant at the edge of a potato field, near the spot where Cote first found Autumn.

For Cote, tying these threads together becomes increasingly difficult as still more wrinkles materialize, including the possibility that her unit harbors a rogue agent. Cote’s brother-in-law, Jonathan Hurley, a self-important ex-con now teaching at the local high school, emerges as the prime suspect in the nighttime shooting of Agent Miguel Jimenez.

Was Autumn left in the field to die? Or did someone deliberately place her there so Cote would find her? Is the child a pawn in an illegal adoption racket? Is the Mexican woman with whom Hurley is having an affair the mother of the abandoned child? And why was Hurley spotted only minutes after Jimenez was shot, walking in the middle of the night near the isolated scene of the shooting?

Some of the characters in Bitter Crossing are more thoroughly fleshed out than others, and I found a few developments hard to believe. Having served time for illegally possessing drugs with intent to sell, would Hurley really be allowed to teach in a public school? And why does Cote’s boss allow her to stay on the case when her brother-in-law crops up as a suspect in the shooting of Jimenez?

But Keeley’s plot races along at such a gallop that it’s easy to put aside such reservations and enjoy the ride. The dialogue is sharp and crisp. Cote, her boss, her mother and her sister are appealing, credible characters.


And the novel’s Aroostook County setting is engrossing, both for Mainers and for people “from away” who may know nothing about what Mainers simply call “The County." The largest county east of the Rockies, Aroostook County is bigger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, yet fewer than 70,000 people live there.

Bitter Crossing, which was published in 2014, is the first of three Peyton Cote novels by D. A. Keeley, a pseudonym used by Maine native John Corrigan, who now lives and works in Massachusetts.

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