[In the following review, Carter lauds Hoffman's characterization and sense of place in Tidewater Blood,but denounces the author for couching the deeper story about the conflict between Virginians and West Virginians within the trappings of a murder mystery.]

Although Cold Mountain and Paradise have managed recently to elbow their way onto the bestseller lists, the top slots are still populated mainly by novels about secret political/economic/terrorist cabals threatening to destroy entire populations unless their demands are met.

In such novels, a protagonist armed only with a Swiss Army knife stumbles unwittingly into the plot, survives massive explosions and enough high-tech firepower to reduce the immediate environment to rubble, restores peace and security to the world, then parts with the frightened female companion he has somehow acquired and returns to his job as a typesetter.

Writers such as Virginia novelist William Hoffman, who explore the complexities of moral conflict in a fallen world, win lots of prizes and get good reviews but usually have to teach for a living. (Hoffman is a long-time professor at Hampden-Sydney College.) Small wonder, then, that they are tempted sometimes to go for the green.

Tidewater Blood, Hoffman's 11th novel, is billed as “a novel of suspense,” a first for this author and for his publisher, the prestigious Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. It would be nice to report here that Hoffman proves he is as adept at concocting a thriller as he is at mining the mysteries of the human heart, but, alas, such is not the case.

The novel opens explosively and ends with a string of revelations that will take even the most alert reader by surprise, but what happens in between doesn't hold up. There are no close brushes with death, no surprise betrayals, no body count. The protagonist simply moves from place to place, encountering a string of eccentric characters, some of whom offer clues to the mystery while others merely provide local color.

This is not to say that the book is not worth reading. Hoffman may not be another John le Carré, but he is a master at evoking the sights, smells, and sounds of the landscape. His knowledge of coal mining is impressive and the detail he imparts, fascinating. And his characters—from a legless dynamite expert to a one-eyed barmaid and an ancient mountain woman—are alive and worth getting to know.

Hoffman's narrator and protagonist, Charlie LeBlanc, is the ne'er-do-well younger son of a prosperous Tidewater family whose fortune originated in the coal mines of West Virginia. When the family's plantation is blown to bits on the 250th anniversary of the arrival in the New World of its founder Jean Maupin LeBlanc, Charlie, an alumnus of Vietnam and Leavenworth, is the chief suspect.

Charged with the murder of his elder brother, his sister-in-law, and their 5-year-old son, Charlie manages to slip his leash and launches his own investigation into the mystery, a mystery whose solution lies in the coal mines abandoned by his father many years earlier.

Hoffman's subtext is the longstanding family feud between West Virginians and their cousins to the east. With one foot in both camps—he was born in West Virginia—Hoffman is uniquely positioned to explore the conflicting values and cultural assumptions of each. This is the story Hoffman really wants to tell and a story that might better have been told without the trappings of the suspense genre.