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	Catherine Chant is a writer from New England as well the FMAM webmaster. She is a PRO member of the Romance Writers of American (RWA) and an active member of the From the Heart Romance Writers (FTHRW) chapter and the National Association of Women Writers (NAWW). A graduate of Boston College, she worked for fifteen years at her alma mater as a computing & communications consultant/technical writer and web content manager. She is currently working on her first novel. She can be reached at webmaster@fmam.biz.

ECHO BAY
Richard Barre
Capra Press, May 2004, $25.95, 354pp.
ISBN 1-59266-042-8

ECHO BAY opens in 1940 with an emotional mercy killing--forty-four-year-old steamship Constance is sunk in Lake Tahoe after years of neglect. The prologue is so poetic and gripping you almost forget it's a ship you're reading about. Constance feels alive on those pages, and you feel for her plight. It is a perfect opening for the battle about to be fought on the following pages.

The story pauses next in 1984, the Men's National Finals. A skier loses his bid for the Olympics and nearly his life in a horrific crash on the slopes. You are right there with him every millisecond from promising start to terrifying finish.

Flash to present day New Mexico and we find Shawn Rainey, that washed-up Olympic hopeful, now with a bad knee, writing copy for a small-town paper and trying to hold together what remains of his life since that day on the slopes. Enter Terry Dahl, Shawn's former business partner who took up with Shawn's wife and replaced Shawn as the father figure in his kids' lives. In a moment of weak judgement Shawn allowed himself to be provoked into assaulting Terry in the presence of his ex-wife and the children. Now the kids live in San Francisco and Shawn is barely allowed to speak to them on the phone.

Terry arrives with an ultimatum Shawn can't refuse. He must return home to Tahoe and lend his name and local celebrity to a project that intends to raise the Constance from the bottom of the lake and turn her into the latest casino/resort attraction. Terry stands to earn a large sum of money from this venture, as do several others involved. Shawn's stake: a modest cut of the profits, but more important, he won't lose his kids. If he fails to get the project off the ground, Terry intends to leave the country and Shawn will never see his children again.

Shawn's return to Tahoe forces him to face a past that he has never really reconciled, while the Constance project puts him at odds with Catherine Mulvhill, the eighty-three-year-old daughter of the shipbuilder responsible for creating and then destroying Constance. Catherine is completely against the idea of raising that ship, and will do everything within her considerable power to prevent it. Shawn will do anything to see that the project goes forth because his kids are on the line. And here's where the fun begins.

The writing style in ECHO BAY is different from most books I've read, the language and sentence structure a little clipped. It took me a chapter or so to get used to it, but once I did, I found the unusual style gave the story a vividness and excitement you don't find in the average novel. The choppy sentences made the story feel immediate; it draws you in, places you right there with the characters.

The attention to detail in ECHO BAY is exceptional--from Tahoe scenery and weather descriptions that make you feel like you are standing on that shoreline or mountain, to the technical aspects of deep sea diving and sailing. I was held enthralled by it all.

Once Shawn starts to address his past and dig into the background of his adversary, Catherine Mulvhill, the slow unveiling of secrets grips you and keeps you glued to the pages. The author does an excellent job of revealing just enough information to gradually build the suspense, but not too much that you know all the answers before the end of the book. ECHO BAY is a book you'll have a hard time putting down.

Catherine Chant

 

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