Abstract
Tawni O’Dell gives a sharply drawn, melancholic portrayal of a town impoverished by unemployment and the bitter memories of past injustices in her latest thriller, One of Us. In the aptly named town of Lost Creek, Pennsylvania, the once productive coal mines have closed but for a single small enterprise employing a handful of miners. The rest of the townspeople live on bitter memories and tourism. They promote the remnants of a gallows where members of a once secret Irish miners’ society, the Nellie O’Neils, were convicted and hung after a bogus trial, their actual crime, trying to bring in the union. Locals attract the tourists by claiming that ghosts of the dead miners come back to accuse the living, especially on the anniversary of the executions.
The old death sentences may connect to a spate of new crimes in the form of a serial killer terminating the lives of several local residents. At the same time, Sheridan “Danny” Doyle, a local man who left Lost Creek to go to college and build a professional career, returns to do battle with his inner demons. Our hero, a noted forensic psychologist, has built a national reputation by interviewing psychopaths and serial killers. Danny (Dr. Doyle) is the son of Owen Doyle, a hard-drinking miner who still lives on the edge of town. Danny is also the grandson of Tommy, a retired miner who has survived into his nineties, despite suffering from the black lung, arthritis, and a lifelong diet of whiskey and fast food.
Dr. Doyle, who is more of an antihero than a classic hero, bears deep emotional scars as a result of growing up in an unstable, violent household. Despite his academic and media successes, he is a broken man inside, the victim of an abusive father and a mentally disturbed mother.
As the serial killer takes one life after another, Doyle crosses swords with the haughty heir to the mining company, Walker Dawes. While the Dawes family no longer “owns” the police and the local politicians outright, they still hold enormous power and consider themselves above the law. In the old days, Walker Dawes’ grandfather had exploited the miners, forcing them to work for low wages and controlling the police, the courts, and even the local newspaper.
Danny partners with the local sheriff, once a schoolyard buddy. Together, they investigate the new murders, with the sheriff warning Danny not to put himself in danger.
And their prime suspect? It is none other than Scarlet Dawes, the beautiful, globe-trotting heiress, and daughter of the current mine owner. Scarlet is a cold, beautiful femme fatale who uses men and then casts them aside when she becomes bored with them. At first, Danny cannot believe that such an entitled person would put her exotic life in danger by killing local residents. But he is determined to find out if she is, in fact, the killer.
The novel moves swiftly ahead as Doyle and his sheriff friend go over the murders and follow for clues. The reader finds poignant and sad portrayals of the old miners, coughing up coal dust and waiting to be returned to the earth in a coffin. Although none of the characters openly speak of the sea changes in energy production roiling the coal mining industry, Lost Creek’s citizens can be seen as symbols of the moribund state of the coal mining industry.
O’Dell makes a salutary effort to depict the hard lives of the miners and the injustices the wealthy mine owners have perpetrated for generations. While the novel vividly depicts the lives of the miners above ground, she does not show us in current time or in flashbacks the miners lying on their backs hacking at a seam of coal, hoping that the roof does not come down and crush them. Danny does make a brief sojourn into the lone surviving mine to try and talk a suicidal miner from blowing himself up, but the journey is not that of a miner toiling in the narrow, suffocating shafts. O’Dell’s story effectively uses coal mining as the historical setting. But her novel would have been even more powerful had she shown the reader the brutal, terrifying nature of that arduous occupation. What’s more, none of the characters engage in organized resistance to the continuing social injustices of this company town perpetrated by the arrogant Dawes family. The passivity of the residents is dispiriting.
Finally, the traumatized hero, Danny Doyle, a renowned forensic psychologist who has interviewed countless shark-eyed killers, trembles, and even faints, when he encounters characters from his past. He seems to almost be in a constant state of fear. His fragility is a little jarring, given his hard-won professional successes.
Nonetheless, O’Dell deserves high praise for setting her novel in Pennsylvania coal country, a setting used in her previous novels, and kudos to her for showing us the sorrowful lot of its citizens as they see their industry decline and die. Perhaps in her next book, she will let us ride the elevator down into the lower depths and hear the miner call out to his fellow miners, “Fire in the hole!”