Twisted Tree, by Kent Meyers (Houghton Mifflin;$24)

I have to admit, the cover of this book initially kept me from reading it. The photo of a horse, taken at sunset or sunrise, seemed more like something trying to appeal to the tweens who watch Saddle Club on Discovery Kids than to grownups looking for a good read.  And it wasn't just the cover art that was off-putting: the jacket describes the plot as revolving around the kidnapping and murder of a young woman suffering from anorexia. Like many people, I generally hate books in which children or teens are the victims.  So it's a wonder that I read the book at all.

But I'm so very glad that I did. Twisted Tree is one of the best books I've read in a long while.  I'm hard pressed to choose what aspect of the book I liked the most: the structure, the setting, the language, or the characters.  The weakest part, actually, is the murder plot.  It ended up being almost unnecessary, and the book would have been stronger had Meyers found some other way to unify the vignettes that comprise the book.

So here's the set-up.  Hayley Jo Zimmerman is slowly starving herself, with the encouragement of the people she's met on a "pro-Ana" website. (These are sites on which, unbelievably, anorexics support each other in their quest to continue to lose weight.) Hayley Jo doesn't know that the virtual friend with whom she's become closest (and shared a fatal amount of identifying information) is actually a fat creep who has been murdering other anorexics in the northern plains. By the end of the first chapter, Hayley Jo is basically out of the book.

Each subsequent chapter focuses on someone else living in the area around Twisted Tree, South Dakota. Although each person has had some tangential contact with Hayley Jo in her short lifetime, she is certainly not central to the action. There's the story of Angela Morrison, a young bride (later, the mother of Hayley Jo's best friend) who slowly goes crazy living on a rattlesnake-infested ranch with her husband Brock. Or Sophie Lawrence, who looks to all of Twisted Tree like a saint for tending to her disabled stepfather, while actually tormenting him in private to make up for how he abused her when she was a girl. And one of my favorites: crazy Shane Valen, whose great-grandfather settled the land, and who--well, I'm not going to give his story away.  ("The thing about weird sonsabitches is they stick to their weird," the sheriff muses about Shane. "You can trust them. Normal people keep their weird hid, so if it ever gets out you have no idea where it'll go.")

The aspect of the book that I found the most amazing, however, is how each detail, no matter how small, ends up being significant in some way.  A marble, two dusty golf bags, some old names carved in a school desk--they appear, and reappear, in a way that speaks to Kent Meyers' precision and--for lack of a better word--control over his writing. I cannot even contemplate the effort it must take to keep track of so many of what might just seem like throw-away details. It reminded me of the movie Crash, one of my favorites, where all the stories end up with overlapping details that you don't even pick up on until you see the movie for a second time. In a similar fashion, my second reading of Twisted Tree unearthed details that I missed the first time because I hadn't realized their significance.

If I were Kent Meyers, I would demand that my publisher change the cover art, rewrite the flyleaf, and pay for a huge book tour in which the book gets as much publicity as is possible. This book simply blew me away.