[In the following review, Frank enthusiastically praises the literary merits and compelling, thrilling story in Tidewater Blood.]

Move over John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell and Sue Grafton—there's a new kid on the mystery writer's block! Charlotte County novelist William Hoffman's Tidewater Blood is tight, taut, compelling and convincing.

Two months ago my wife and I were on our way to visit my brother in New Port Richey, Florida via Savannah, Georgia. Courtesy of my wife's sister we had with us a twelve hour tape of Dean Koontz' Intensity. It was so gripping that we thought about driving around Savannah after our arrival just so we could-listen to the novel's conclusion. Yesterday I had to sit with our other Savanna, our granddaughter, who was recovering from a strep throat. I took along with me my copy of Tidewater Blood, assuming I could read a chapter or two while she dozed, worked on her homework, or watched television. I never put the book down until I finished it several hours later!

As the poet and novelist Fred Chappell wrote in a pre-publication review, Tidewater Blood is “an irresistible story of revenge, flight, recognition and ingenious detective work. Here is a novel as taut as a drumhead, as sinewy as braided cable, as powerful as the momentum of a falling boulder. I was helpless in its grip.” In a brief prologue we learn that a powerful Tidewater, Virginia aristocratic family, while gathered to celebrate its 250 year founding, is blown to pieces standing on the portico of the family mansion. The attention of the investigating authorities is immediately and solely focused on the black sheep of the family, Charles MacKay LeBlanc. Charlie, a Viet Nam vet, has brought shame and humiliation to the proud LeBlanc family because he had been court martialed, sent to Leavenworth, and given a dishonorable discharge. He in turn has repudiated the LeBlanc name, and has taken the name Jim Moultrie, a name he tells us that he took from a tombstone in Tampa, Florida.

But there are too many people in Tidewater and King County who remember Charlie, what he looks like and what he had done to earn the animosity of his own family, so it is Charlie LeBlanc that the reader follows throughout the novel.

When Charlie is apprehended by the authorities he is staying in a shack at Lizard Inlet on the Chesapeake Bay, existing on vegetables grown in his garden and oysters and fish from the salty marshes. Taken in handcuffs to the county seat, Jessup’s Wharf, Charlie is viciously maltreated by the sherrif’s deputies who assume his guilt. Because there is no solid evidence against Charlie he is released with the provision that he sign in at the local jail each morning by 8:00, and he is forbidden to leave the county. But Charlie knows that unless he proves his innocence he will indeed be found guilty, and given the multiple murders he will in all probability get the chair for his crime.

Through a process worthy of Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin, Charlie soon reaches the conclusion that the solution to the crime lays not at the LeBlanc mansion itself in King County, but in the coalfields of West Virginia, the source of the LeBlanc wealth. Branded as a known felon and fugitive, Charlie heads for the hills and mountains of West Virginia, hounded by state police from two states, and narrowly escaping arrest on several occasions. Along the way he is aided by a wonderful cast of characters, the majority of them also outcasts and drop-outs from society. Befriended by the friendless, Charlie slowly begins to unlock terrible and searing secrets from the LeBlanc past: there is Arthur Moss, a retired slaesman and amateur historian; Blackie, a young, tough widow trying to make a living running a bar and truckstop; Cornstalk Skagg, a friend of man who literally lives in a cave; an elderly mountain woman known as Aunt Jessie; an old army buddy from his earlier Nam days, Zeke Webb; and a community college physics teacher, Dr. Alexander B. Bingham.

How Hoffman puts all of these ingredients together, stirs them up, and solves the riddles, secrets and motives behind the multiple murders is, of course, the essence of Tidewater Blood. But in writing this novel William Hoffman is not merely writing a mystery novel, or an interesting and entertaining classic “whodunit.” Hoffman is still very much the master of language, point of view, setting, characterization and scene. With a single sentence Hoffman can evoke the isolation and loneliness of his fugitive protagonist: “People flowed around me as if I were a rock in a stream, especially the alarmed ladies.” Or consider Charlie's state of mind during one of his visits to Bellerive, the LeBlanc family estate: “Drinking from the bottle I allowed no childhood memories to take full shape. When they attempted to emerge. I dismembered them.” And William Hoffman's power of description is still as good as it gets: here is his picture of Charlie’s first visit to Aunt Jessie: “She wore a poke bonnet of a kind I didn’t know could be bought in this day and time, and her plain brown dress appeared homespun and also from another age. Her body curved to her work. She was ancient, her face weathered, the wrinkles in so deep they shadowed themselves. Her skin appeared tough as saddle leather. Her hands were gnarled and clawlike, yet she gripped pods with a deliberate tenderness as she pulled them from the vines.”

But to this reader the novel's major achievement is the deftness with which Hoffman transforms the protagonist. Charlie LeBlanc, from his initial appearance as a dirty, smelly hermit to a human being with daring, courage, ingenuity and integrity, an evolution that grows on the reader along with the novel.

Equally worthy of recognition, however, is William Hoffman's recreation of the perfect revenge story. For Tidewater Blood is also a compelling story of betrayal, resolution and revenge, a revenge so complete and devastating that had circumstances (or the sometimes friendly forces of fate) not intervened, the entire LeBlanc family—roots and offspring—would have been destroyed. To say more would be to say too much, considering that the novel's primary appeal is that of suspense and mystery. Suffice it to say at this point that as Charlie's search for the one or ones responsible for the multiple murders deepens, and he discovers secrets too horrific for the human soul to bear unscarred, he also discovers himself, in the classic Greek sense of “to know thyself.” Like Jack Burden of Warren’s All The King's Men, by the end of the novel Charlie LeBlanc, too, is able to re-enter the world he had abandoned, and accept the awful responsibility of time. As William Faulkner said, the past is never dead—it's not even past yet.

Tidewater Blood is much more then than a classic literary whodunit in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe or Greek tragedy, more even than a first rate, page turning thriller that other reviewers have called it. It is also, in the words of Marshall Snow of “Mostly Murder, Mystery and Mayhem Bookstore,” of South Grafton, Massachusetts (who incidentally gave it a rating of 10), “one heck of a book—don't miss it!!!”