The Plague of Doves

The gun jammed on the last shot and the baby stood holding the crib rail, eyes wild, bawling.
This is the first line in Louise Erdrich's book, "The Plague of Doves". I don't think that I've ever read a more terrifying opening sentence in my life. I read the book in a mad rush, staying up until the wee hours to finish. The house was so silent, save for the snores of a beagle. Night and gravity were everywhere, which seemed fitting, given the words spread out on acid-free pages before my eyes.
If history was an animal it'd be a coyote, the trickster. It would howl, announce itself, but retreat if you approached too closely. Linger on the periphery, gauge what to reveal and when. Still, it's eyes would burn and prickle at the small hairs on your neck, letting you know that it was there, if hidden.
So it is that Pluto, ND emerges, skulks from a treeline to show itself under the deft voice of Erdrich. Halfway through the book I sat at a table on the front porch with MK. I set the book down, sighed, lit a cigarette, took a drink of my after dinner wine, and said that this is the best work of fiction that I'd read in a long time, possibly ever. Yes, I'm an unabashed fan of Erdrich's, but mark my words, despite well deserved praise for previous works, this book is different. This book is utterly brilliant. It shimmers like pavement on a hot summer's day that is endless. Yes, I take to heart to either love completely or not at all, and in this instance, I held it all right in my hands. Oh, I don't want to fawn, yet there it all is. It. Me. The 7pm fire whistle marking time. The, our, cat lying on a neighbor's porch to avoid the beagle. MK looked up from her book, smiled, and went back to the page when I didn't say anything more. Then the cat came near, thought better of it, and disappeared around a privacy hedge.
Crime and punishment are as old as the hills. And like I argued with a friend years ago, vigilante justice is ugly, but at least it's honest, never tries to be anything other than what it is. At least to an objective observer. Things change, of course, if you're the one meting it out. Then you have to have holy wrath, or some sort of justification behind your madness. It's not enough to have method to your madness, you must have method to your method, which is almost impossible, or just plain impossible.
Erdrich revisits an actual crime, a mass murder followed by a mass lynching, placing it in the fictional hamlet of Pluto, ND. Her reimagining is thoughtful, almost tender, in that awful way in how a mob mentality can supersede reason, particularly when an overt anti-Native American racism exists. No one draws characters fully dimensional the way Erdrich does, so we get to meet the innocent and guilty, and get to learn a bit about their legacy decades later as well. It's a richly told story, at times not for the faint of heart, but rewarding all the same.
For those on gay/lesbian character watch, the main female voice we get to hear grows up to be a lesbian. We get to experience her shock at this revelation, and also her sensible acceptance of it without too much quibbling on her part. It's very matter of fact, and refreshing in that sense.