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The Fifth Season
In Don Bredes’s Cold Comfort , Hector Bellevance left Vermont for Harvard, graduated into a job with the Boston Police Department, made detective, married, divorced, accidentally shot his partner during a raid gone bad, and then returned to Vermont because, as Robert Frost famously said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Now, in The Fifth Season , he’s back in the town of Tipton, growing vegetables for the farmer’s market, dating Wilma Strong, the hotshot reporter for the local paper, and serving as town constable, when Marcel Boisvert—a contrary town father who, as road commissioner, maintains Tipton’s rural thoroughfares—apparently goes berserk. Hector finds the county sheriff shot dead in Marcel’s dooryard and the Tipton town clerk shot dead in her office. Marcel has disappeared.
Hector and Wilma and half of the Vermont State Police are looking for Marcel—and looking over their shoulders at the same time. The small town’s history, the complex interrelationships of people whose fathers and grandfathers were friends, and the outlaw independence of such a place all play into a tale of love, betrayal, and one very strange season.
Now, in The Fifth Season , he’s back in the town of Tipton, growing vegetables for the farmer’s market, dating Wilma Strong, the hotshot reporter for the local paper, and serving as town constable, when Marcel Boisvert—a contrary town father who, as road commissioner, maintains Tipton’s rural thoroughfares—apparently goes berserk. Hector finds the county sheriff shot dead in Marcel’s dooryard and the Tipton town clerk shot dead in her office. Marcel has disappeared.
Hector and Wilma and half of the Vermont State Police are looking for Marcel—and looking over their shoulders at the same time. The small town’s history, the complex interrelationships of people whose fathers and grandfathers were friends, and the outlaw independence of such a place all play into a tale of love, betrayal, and one very strange season.
- GenresMystery
308 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
2 people are currently reading
12 people want to read
About the author
Don Bredes
7 books12 followersI am a freelance writer of novels, essays, and screenplays and a teacher of writing and contemporary literature. I live in the hills of northern Vermont.
I earned an MFA in Fiction from the University of California at Irvine and an AB in English Composition from Syracuse University. I have been a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University, and I've been awarded grants for my fiction by the Vermont Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
My first novel, HARD FEELINGS (Atheneum, 1977), was an American Library Association Best Book in 1977 and a 20th Century-Fox film release in 1982. My published work includes four other novels, MULDOON (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), and my Hector Bellevance mystery/suspense trilogy, COLD COMFORT (Harmony Books, 2001), THE FIFTH SEASON (Three Rivers Press, 2005), and THE ERRAND BOY (Three Rivers Press, 2009).
My new novel, an edgy young adult fantasy called POLLY AND THE ONE AND ONLY WORLD, will be released in October by Green Writers Press. Those who may be interested in my writing may visit my Web site, my Don Bredes page on Facebook, or my Author's Page at Amazon.
I've published short stories, essays, and book reviews in a variety of publications, including "The New York Times Sunday Magazine," "The Los Angeles Times Book Review," and "Paris Review."
Two of my screenplay adaptations have been independently produced and released internationally as feature-length films, "Where the Rivers Flow North," starring Rip Torn and Michael J. Fox, and "A Stranger in the Kingdom," with an ensemble cast including Ernie Hudson and Martin Sheen. They're available on DVD.
When I'm not writing or teaching, I like to cook, garden (mostly vegetables), read, play tennis, hike, birdwatch, fly kites, look at the stars and galaxies, fish for trout, ride my mountain bike, snowshoe, and cross-country ski, as the seasons permit.
I earned an MFA in Fiction from the University of California at Irvine and an AB in English Composition from Syracuse University. I have been a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University, and I've been awarded grants for my fiction by the Vermont Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
My first novel, HARD FEELINGS (Atheneum, 1977), was an American Library Association Best Book in 1977 and a 20th Century-Fox film release in 1982. My published work includes four other novels, MULDOON (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), and my Hector Bellevance mystery/suspense trilogy, COLD COMFORT (Harmony Books, 2001), THE FIFTH SEASON (Three Rivers Press, 2005), and THE ERRAND BOY (Three Rivers Press, 2009).
My new novel, an edgy young adult fantasy called POLLY AND THE ONE AND ONLY WORLD, will be released in October by Green Writers Press. Those who may be interested in my writing may visit my Web site, my Don Bredes page on Facebook, or my Author's Page at Amazon.
I've published short stories, essays, and book reviews in a variety of publications, including "The New York Times Sunday Magazine," "The Los Angeles Times Book Review," and "Paris Review."
Two of my screenplay adaptations have been independently produced and released internationally as feature-length films, "Where the Rivers Flow North," starring Rip Torn and Michael J. Fox, and "A Stranger in the Kingdom," with an ensemble cast including Ernie Hudson and Martin Sheen. They're available on DVD.
When I'm not writing or teaching, I like to cook, garden (mostly vegetables), read, play tennis, hike, birdwatch, fly kites, look at the stars and galaxies, fish for trout, ride my mountain bike, snowshoe, and cross-country ski, as the seasons permit.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 2, 2018
It's me. It's a style thing. Yankee characters introduced left and right, and it took me three-quarters of the book to sort them out. Okay, not as bad as all that, but the lifelong land feuds and the maniac revenge is probably just the thing in a quiet Northeast Kingdom town.
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