Book Review – The Dark End of Town

Author: Julia Pomeroy
Cover Artist: Maria Elias
Publisher: Carroll & Graf
Binding: Hardcover
Publication Date: March 2006

ulia Pomeroy’s debut, THE DARK END OF TOWN, offers a clear-eyed look at people and their relationships, their tragic entanglements and amazing resilience. Abby Silvernale has only a brief and discouraging modeling career in New York City before meeting her student-husband who moves them back to their mutual hometown. Bantam, New York boasts a collection of townies and tourists and Manhattan ex-pats, plus views of the nearby blue Catskills on one side and the Berkshires on the other. After struggling to create an upstate haven for young filmmakers and artists, Abby’s husband suddenly dies, abandoning his 30 year-old widow. Conflicted by grief and guilt, Abby rents out her husband’s inherited land and farmhouse to another couple while living in a used trailer on the property and waiting tables at the InnBetween, Bantam’s most popular fine restaurant among locals and transplants alike.

To fill her hours and pay off the trailer’s septic field, Abby works as a typist for a rich, bombastic screenwriter who’s at his alternate home in Hollywood and as a caterer for the well-heeled and well-connected still in town. Like her main workplace, Abby’s in-between, too, almost ready to step into a fuller life, not simply working until she drops into a lonely sleep broken by sad dreams. Perhaps that’s why she accepts the pre-dawn call from her boss, Dulcie, who wants her to stake out a cul-de-sac and figure out who’s been “borrowing” a minivan. While the initial problem may seem mundane, Abby will be led onward into the deepening mysteries of a young woman’s disappearance and a teenager accused of murder.

The strength of this book is Pomeroy’s deftness with the real-world scale of tensions within her characters and their interplay with the community. She creates an accurate portrayal of the arduous lifestyle of restaurant workers, something millions of us know first-hand, but rarely read with authenticity among the many amateur sleuths who always seem to get someone to cover their shifts, don’t regularly get footsore, and who never seem to be bleaching surfaces and dumping ice until 2:00a.m. Amid the back-breaking labor, difficult customers, and everyday catastrophes, Pomeroy shows how a popular restaurant (with a bar full of social lubricant) also becomes a community hub, a place where gossip is made and exchanged and where strong relationships develop between staff and patrons. She illustrates the ambivalence toward the cyclically invasive tourists felt by the local workers and business owners that need them, as well as between the community’s wealthiest and those that become their permanent service employees. The protagonist herself is believably drawn, not extremely wise-cracking, gloomily self-absorbed, or unnaturally prescient. Her grief and the way she daily pushes it aside to get on with the business of living feel real, and Pomeroy’s writing is fittingly clean and direct.

As a reader, the toughest going for me was early on, where the rationale for Abby’s involvement in, and her boss’s irritating detachment from, the late-night van-napping seems a little contrived. However, despite any brief weaknesses in plot motivation, the characters and situations ring true, with more balance and humanity than most small-town mysteries you’re likely to find. The solution is legitimate and satisfying, though this novel isn’t for those who love clockwork puzzles above the human ones. May Abby Silvernale’s ongoing adventures continue to prove that soft-boiled crime novels don’t need to be overwrought, insipid, or unrealistic, but can instead provide richer, more complex glimpses of interesting, recognizable places inhabited by flesh-and-blood people.

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