McMorrow, a big-city newspaperman transplanted to rural Maine, is realized
fully in Potshot. He's still a cynic, still flashing his New York
Times i.d. when he needs to impress the yokels, still making wisecracks.
But he has turned into a guy you'd like to have living up the road, someone who
respects you until you give him a reason not to and on whom you can depend. He
is emotionally vulnerable when it comes to his girlfriend, Roxanne. And he
reacts to situations in ways that make sense. After he learns that someone is
stalking Roxanne, McMorrow initially threatens to go after the stalker. In
contrast to legions of fictitious sleuths, he allows the police to talk him
into let-ting them handle the problem. When he has to follow a lead into a
Massachusetts industrial city fallen on the hardest of hard times, he doesn't
go alone but takes his friend Clair, an ex-Marine. Even his dimwit moves are
plausible, as when, near the end of the book, he allows impatience to lead him
into danger against his better judgment. Readers of fiction about Maine can't help but be impressed with the grasp
Boyle has on the place. There are no quaint, Murder-She-Wrote villages here,
populated by Down East "characters." Neither does "the other Maine" described
by writer Carolyn Chute bear down on you in Boyle's hands, though Boyle is
unsentimental about rural poverty. This is Maine as seen by someone who came
from somewhere else but stayed and kept his eyes open. It has pros and cons,
real warts and wonders. Boyle's clever title plays both on one of the major plot drivers (the movement
to legalize marijuana) and on a shooting early in the story. It is a signal of
things to come in this smooth, engaging, well-crafted book. And, though it is
impossible to predict how many McMorrow books Boyle will write, he is gaining
the kind of mastery of the field that makes readers want more.
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