William Diehl: Eureka

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Eureka, a mud-swamped little town a hundred miles from California, started life as a bootlegger's paradise. Diehl takes us there first in 1900 where a rich young Jewish boy, Ben Gorman, and a poor young Irish boy, Thomas Brodie Culhane, play baseball and ride their horses.

The boys are best friends. Culhane has been taken in by the wealthy Gorman family and is treated like a second son. He'll grow up to become sheriff of a prosperous little town. Gorman will run its most profitable bank. It's the same town, now law-abiding and proud of it, and now called San Pietro.

Forty-one years later, in LA, the body of a woman called Verna Wilensky is found dead in her bath. It looks like an accident: a bath, a gin, a radio. And one fried dame.

Police detective Zeke Bannon reckons it all looks too tidy. Wilensky is a woman without a past: she's got almost $100,000 in the bank, no record of where it came from, and has left no will. The trail will take Bannon back to a place once called Eureka where they're not too keen on strangers sniffing around.

Diehl's put too many skeletons in the closet and the sometimes mawkish family saga running through the book muddies the tone.

William Heinemann

$34.95