The Virgin of Small Plains
Nancy Pickard
Ballantine Books, 2006
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 0-345-47099-0
352 pages; $23.95

Nancy Pickard’s Jenny Cain mysteries entertained me straight through the 1980s. She lost me, though, in 1993, with The 27-Ingredient Chili Con Carne Murders, her completion of a book left unfinished by Virginia Rich at the time of her death. Suddenly Pickard was no longer on my must-read list, even though I did add her Marie Lightfoot mysteries to my collection.

Then this year’s Edgar and Agatha nominations came out, and perched on the “Best Novel” list was The Virgin of Small Plains. And a couple of Readerville regulars whose opinion I trust raved about the book and Pickard’s departure from series characters. I decided to give it a try.

It was worth the read. The Virgin of Small Plains is fast-moving, populated with intriguing and believable characters, and depicts life in a small town that feels much like the Illinois town I grew up in, where everybody knew everybody. The story jumps between 1987, when a mystery went deliberately unsolved, to 2004, when a woman dies, a man returns to town, and terrible questions that have haunted the protagonists for 17 years begin to demand answers.

There are three protagonists: Abby Reynolds, the town doctor’s daughter, Mitch Newquist, the judge’s son, and Rex Shellenberger, the sheriff’s son. Abby and Mitch are high school sweethearts. They are not only in love, but in lust as only high school kids in the throes of first love can be, every touch the most exquisite and unbearable caress and every thought seemingly in concert. On our first visit to 1987, we find Abby and Mitch cuddling in Abby’s bed, debating whether this is the night to lose their virginity to one another. Mitch, being the good guy that he is, doesn’t have a condom on him, and he ventures down to the doctor’s office to find one. And in that short trip down the stairs begin all the problems.

The next thing Abby knows, Mitch is gone – really gone, shipped out of town and away from her attempts to snag a boy above her station – or so says his mother. Abby is shattered. Rex is shattered for another reason, for what he saw that night. And Mitch is shattered at his family’s sudden, unexplained rejection.

In 2004, Mitch returns to Small Plains to visit his mother’s grave, and suddenly everything begins to unravel. The tornado that greets him is the perfect metaphor for what happens to the town when he is spotted: everything is turned upside down, and danger is everywhere. Suddenly everyone’s story about that night in 1987 starts to come out, and the inconsistent suppositions and conclusions reached by the three young friends and their parents are exposed for the sadly wrong explanations they are. And as the mysteries of 17 years before approach solutions, people start to die.

Pickard tells her story through the eyes of many of those who populate Small Plains, using each of the three friends and several other important characters as viewpoint characters in turn. It is a difficult technique, but Pickard accomplishes it. In addition, her likable characters remain likable even when they do misguided things, and her unlikable characters all have sparks in them that make them real rather than caricatures of bad guys.

This novel kept me guessing almost to the end, but that is because of the book’s only real flaw: the ending comes out of nowhere, with the ultimate villain of the piece someone to whom no clues have pointed. But then, the point of this book does not seem to be the mystery itself. Rather, this is a character study of a small town in the Midwest, its mores, its relationships, its class barriers – and, in the world of 2004, its survival in a world that is ever more urban, where children leave the moment they graduate from high school and build lives elsewhere. This books left me yearning for a small town atmosphere in which you see and converse with someone you know every day, and no one gets so close behind you on the subway platform that you think he’s stealing your wallet. In this world, people visit the cemetery on Memorial Day because they still remember what that day means, and there’s only a single pizza parlor. It is a world that may be dying in real life; but here, in Small Plains, it thrives.