Roper is illiterate. He is a poor, hard-working black man in the unforgiving heart of south Georgia, striving each day to put distance between his new life and his probation for a petty crime one year earlier. His routine is his savior: At sunrise he mounts the tractor belonging to Math Taylor, a prominent white landowner, and grooms the vast grounds of the Taylor home-until one morning, when Roper's routine goes terribly wrong. While mowing the tall grass at the back end of the property, he comes across the body of his boss's wife, dead of a heart attack. In a moment of panic, terrified that he'll be blamed for her death and sent back to jail, Roper hides her body where it will not befound.

With the ensuing days and weeks comes a painstaking, and fruitless, search for the missing woman. The police want to interview Roper, to ask him if he happened to see Lora Taylor before her mysterious disappearance. After all, wasn't he running the tractor around the time she vanished?

Now Roper is not sure he did the right thing. He should have called for help. And there is no way he can come forward at this point. As the investigation begins and the tragedy hits the evening news, Roper is nearly crippled with self-induced fear and paranoia.

A gritty novel of suspense, Whistle'is a powerful departure for acclaimed southern novelist Janice Daugharty. Masterfully weaving the fears of a desperate man with the stark lives of those around him, Daugharty creates a landscape of profound questions and moral quandary. Whistle is Daugharty's most evocative and ambitious novel to date.

(from the book jacket)

Just released after serving a prison term for trafficking in crack cocaine, Roper Rackard is trying to repair the wreckage of his life while mowing fields and doing odd jobs for a rich white farmer in rural Georgia. But Whistle, Janice Daugharty's new novel, is the story of Roper's bad luck--ill fortune that begins when he finds the body of his boss's wife, who has died of natural causes, by the side of the road.

As the plot switchbacks through a succession of disorienting turns, the dead woman's shoe becomes a pawn in a treacherous game involving Roper's mother, his two sons, blackmail, drug abuse and confessions of secrets dating back to the civil rights movement. Despite a certain flatness of style and an unfortunate fondness for cliches of language and characterization--short-comings that keep her prose from soaring--Daugharty does a fine job of demonstrating how ordinary men and women are affected, in unpredictable ways, by race, poverty and geography and by the enduring legacy of important historical moments.

by Francine Prose