The Long Rain by Peter Gadol Reviewed by Steve Rudd

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After I had walked around the winery, I climbed back in my truck and continued driving farther up into the foothills, and some nights I did make it as far as the mountain road. I wanted to cross the Diablo range. I wanted to keep driving clear across the state and into the desert, deep into the American vastness, where I knew no one and no one knew me. I wanted to drive for days and, wherever I finally stopped, take a new name and start my life over. Sumptuously set amidst the wine-making vineyards on California's Pacific Coast, not too far from the fun and frolics that the beautiful city of San Francisco has to offer, The Long Rain is a righteously riveting read from Peter Gadol... a man of incredible writing talent who lives in California himself (and who lets such a fact show through his glorious scene-setting descriptions of the area), and who is the awe-inspiring author of a number of other incredible stories including Coyote, The Mystery Roast and Closer To The Sun.

Still, as this dark novel proves, the Golden state of California isn't always bright and refreshingly breezy for everyone. Far from it, once family man Jason accidentally runs down and kills a young boy on a remote mountain road near to his home. Jason is a lawyer, and if he admits to being involved in the accident then he routinely stands to lose much - including his law-abiding reputation, along with his wife and son. Even if the accident was exactly that... 'an accident.'

So Jason decides to deny all knowledge of the accident and thus acts shocked upon 'learning' about what has happened up on the mountain road, with The Long Rain subsequently following the course of the lies that Jason has to subsequently make up in order to keep himself in the clear.

Fans of Tom Wolfe's epic drama masterpiece The Bonfire of the Vanities should be in their element here, as this Gadol-geared novel presents the same moral dilemma. Indeed, when a man stands to lose anything, he naturally seems driven to manic extremes in order to keep from being branded guilty. Luckily for Jason, somebody else actually owns up to having mown the youngster down - a revelation that obviously stuns Jason when he knows for a fact that he himself was the man to blame, his foot fast to the floor on that winding road in the rain.

So Jason, coincidentally being a lawyer, carefully delves into the case against the man who's being 'wrongly convicted' of the 'crime,' and in time Jason realises that the incarcerated man merely thinks that he killed the boy in a hit and run. The man admits to having been on the road at the time of the accident, but he was too drunk to know what happened for sure up there that night...

As Jason gets to know the man in prison better, he gradually feels more and more guilty that this essentially innocent man is serving time on Jason's behalf, so Jason - in an engrossing twist to the tale - begins to fight for an appeal for the guy behind bars. Jason is effectively ashamed of what he has done, and thinks that if he can free the man who has been blamed for the boy's death then he might just redeem - and be forgiven for - such a looming sin. After all, a secret shame is often harder to live with than a public shame.

Continued.... Next Page

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