The Scent Of Rain and Lightning
By Nancy Pickard
Hodder, $38.99
Reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

This mystery-cum-family saga held me in thrall during a red-eye flight across the Tasman and kept me guessing till the final chapters. Set in Kansas it’s the story of Jody Linder who is suspicious of happiness because she knows firsthand how unreliable it can be. “At all times people she knew lost their homes, their ranches, their jobs,” we’re told. “Or they died just when you least expected them to.”

When Jody is three years old her father is murdered and her mother disappears. The Linders are a rich, influential family that dominate the little town they live in and the local ne’er do well Billy Crosby is quickly spirited off to jail for the shocking crime. But years later the verdict is questioned and Billy is released, coming back to live just a few streets away from the now grown up Jody who begins to question whether he really is the man who left her orphaned.

It’s Pickard’s characters that make this book such a pleasure to read especially the Dallas-style family: the tough old cattle rancher, his three golden sons and his discontented daughter-in-law. Pickard slips effortlessly between the novel’s present and the hot late summer of the murders, setting up her story. She weaves in romance and faithfully details small-town American life without ever letting the pace flag. A sensitive and expressive writer she brings rural Kansas, its landscape, weather and community alive.

There’s plenty of action and melodrama as the story unfolds and the mystery at the centre of this book is what drives it but it’s the exploration of the character of Jody that makes it such a classy ride – courageous and damaged, attracted to the one man in town she’s not meant to go near, slowly piecing together the clues as she struggles to work out how and why her family was destroyed.
I’d be astonished if you predict the way this story ends. Thriller lovers might complain the denouement comes too far out of left field to be credible but for me it was a satisfying read, rich and tender, with full-bodied characters and loads of atmosphere.

 Footnote:
Nicky Pellegrino,  a succcesful author of popular fiction, (her former title The Italian Wedding was published in May 2009 while her latest, Recipe for Life was published by Orion in April, 2010), is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above piece was first published on 8 August.