Junior

Junior Beauchamp takes the drawing assignment of his third-grade teacher seriously, unlike most of the assignments he is given. But when one of the kids in the class bullies Junior about being on the free lunch program, he drives his pencil into the boy’s thigh.

Junior gets a job at a service station in his teens that gives him access to easy beer and his boss’s car for him and his friends and gives him time away from taking care of his junkie mother, Amber Lee, and little brother, JP. Junior confronts Rick, a man working on the roof of the house his mother rents, about having assaulted a neighbor’s child, and Rick ends up dead. Junior disposes of the body in a horrific manner.

Thomas Robert Gunne comes to town. He’s a local boy who became a state trooper but now works plain clothes. Thom and Amber Lee have some history. He’s there to look into the local drug trade and a guy named Stosh who runs the local pharmacy, but Thom’s aware of the pedophile/roofer who has gone missing.

The school counselor wants Junior to go to art school after graduation and arranges for a scholarship for him. But he needs to keep his nose clean to make that happen, and with the kind of rage he carries around and lets loose now and then, everything is in danger of coming apart.

Amber leaves town for a while, leaving Junior and JP on their own. They get evicted and end up with Bluepriest, a Black hermit, who becomes something of a mentor for the boys. Junior works odd jobs and releases his rage on people who don’t know what they have unleashed. Meanwhile, Amber is being stalked by Buddy Biszewski, bad news from her past.

Interspersed among the story chapters are short police report chapters with interviews with various characters readers have met in the story. They pull the pieces together and pull the story along to its untidy, but believable, conclusion.

Author Jon Boilard has created a most interesting cast of characters, all of whom are believable though few are people with whom one would like to spend time. There are so many characters, it is a bit hard to keep track. The story is set in rural western Massachusetts, although there is a southern rhythm throughout the book. The story is compelling and quite unpredictable.

The writing is good, but the author uses a lazy style of writing without appropriate grammar; most specifically, he foregoes the use of quotation marks. It makes it particularly difficult to discern where dialogue begins and ends. The publisher describes the book as a coming-of-age story, but no one should mistake this as a book for young people. It is not. Readers who are looking for tension on every page will like this book.