[title subtitle=”review:Anita Paddock”][/title]
The Home Place opens on a bitterly cold January night in Billings, Montana. There’s a party at a house on the wrong side of the tracks, and in that house is eleven-year-old Brittany, who’s supposed to be asleep under a pile of visitors’ coats that have collected on the bed. But she is not asleep, and she watches as her mother, Vicky Terrebonne, stumbles away from the party and into the freezing night. She calls out to her mother, but in the howling wind her voice disappears. The next morning, Vicky’s body is found on a deserted street three blocks away. To the police, it looks like an accident. They attribute her death to the cold night, her heavy drinking, the likelihood that she passed out and died of exposure. But could they be wrong? Could it be murder?
So begins the quest of how she died. Her older sister, Alma, an attorney in Seattle, is called home to make funeral plans and to see to Brittany. The only Terrebonne to leave home in seven generations, Alma has no intention of staying more than a week, but her relatives, and the sheer beauty of the land, cause her to stay and find out the real cause of her sister’s death.
Alma is the main character, and we follow the story through her eyes. She’s the stereotypical over-achieving lawyer who’s trying to make partner at a big corporate law firm. There is not much, at least in the beginning, to like about her. As the story unfolds, her love for her dead sister becomes evident. We see the way she deals with her family: her brother Pete, a recovering alcoholic who owns a coffee shop; her grandmother who moved to town but still owns the home place that’s falling into disrepair; and her motherless niece. Little by little, her heart is revealed, and she becomes a likable heroine.
In time, she learns of even more trouble in her family. Coal companies want the mineral rights to the home place, and Alma has to deal with an unscrupulous landman and a meth dealer who moved into the deserted house on the homestead.
Her high school boyfriend, Chance, enters the picture, and their passion for each other is rekindled. The two parted ways when Alma abruptly left Chance to attend college on a scholarship to Bryn Mawr.
The Home Place is filled with secrets, some revealed and others kept till the very end. You’ll stay up late into the night trying to unravel the mystery of who killed Vicky Terrebonne and why.
This is La Seur’s debut novel, and it’s been getting a great deal of praise. She spent a decade writing it, making sure it was exactly right. The payoff is a novel that shows us what home means, how the people we call family shape us, and how we are defined by the places we come from.
