'Master of the Delta' is laced with unexpected twists (AP)

"Master of the Delta" (Harcourt, 367 pages, $24), by Thomas H. Cook: "A man doesn't need to know everything," the genteel old Southerner tells his grown son.

"Why?" the son asks.

"Because," the old man replies, "the answer to a heartfelt question, Jack, will always break your heart."

Nevertheless, Jack Branch cannot resist re-examining the violent events of half a century ago that turned his promising life into a tragedy.

"Master of the Delta," the latest crime novel by Thomas H. Cook, is fashioned as a reminiscence, the action all unfolding in the past as Jack looks back in the hope of understanding how his life has come to this. It is a device Cook has used effectively several times before, most recently in "The Cloud of Unknowing" (2007).

As the scion of a landed Southern family, Jack had all the advantages: money, breeding, private school. But in 1954, still in his youth, he returned to his little hometown of Lakeland to teach in the public high school, where many of the kids come from a poor part of town known as the Bridges.

Jack was a naive do-gooder back then, eager to find a poor but promising boy to mentor. He found such a boy in Eddie, a sullen outcast whose father had been the Coed Killer, a notorious local murderer. Both the town and Eddie himself worry that he may become like his father, but Jack is convinced that biology is not destiny. He sets Eddie to work on a term paper, researching his father's story.

Jack sees it as a kind of purging. It does not turn out the way he planned. From the distance of old age, Jack partly blames himself for what he has set in motion.

"I was badly shaped by my good fortune," Jack tells the reader, "and so failed to see the darkness and the things that darkness hides."

But fate, too, plays its role. "A short walk through the town cemetery," Jack says, "reveals how many lives are destroyed not by someone else's enmity or their own poor choice or bad behavior, but simply by misfortune."

The plot is laced with unexpected twists, and Cook's writing is deeply atmospheric. At times, the prose has the heavy, haunted quality one expects of gothic novels.

In this excerpt, for example, Jack is describing Lakeland:

"A Negro netherworld made up the east side of town, unknowable as Africa itself, and with nothing rising from it, at least not yet, save for the fervent voices of its ministers and the singing of its choirs, both of which, during the long languid summers of religious revival, were broadcast from loudspeakers mounted precariously in the trees gathered round their always freshly painted churches."