No Certain Rest: A Novel [Paperback]

The plot is the most intruiging part of the book. An archeology professor stumbles across a case where a landowner found some bones of a Union soldier buried in his property. The more the professor investigates the conditions of his burial, the more confused he gets about the circumstances surrounding the solider's death. Early in the story, the soldier's history is linked to the battle of Antietam, the bloodiest battle to occur during a very bloody war.

Jim Lehrer would be pretty good at writing nonfiction works since he knows so much about what he's assigned himself to write. But he just can't put it into a hypothetical content. And if he does, it is not done with ease. One gets the nagging feeling, while reading, that the whole process of writing a piece of fiction did not come easily to Mr. Lehrer.

Too bad too, because No Certain Rest can give many lessons to its readers concerning history, the ethics of archeology, the role that the past plays in the present, and so on. It's a short book, so if you do in fact pick it up, try to tough it out.

This is an interesting, if short book. There are interesting themes here. Several of the main characters almost kill one another (or do so) at various points, and you get the feeling that Mr. Lehrer is trying to make a point about violence and friendships. There is also some thoughts on the Civil War and the soldiers who died in it, and refreshingly it's not mostly about the gallant Confederates, who tend to get most of the ink in this sort of thing. I enjoyed the book, and would recommend it.

Human remains are found on the Antietam Battlefield by relic hunters. The archaeological exploration by the National Park Service reveals that the man buried on that bloody field was a Union Lieutenant whose body supposedly rests hundreds of miles away -- under a glorious Monument in a small town in Connecticut that still remembers his devotion in fond memory.

The book is a mystery that solves the identity problems of switched Civil War bodies as well as unraveling hundred and forty year old secrets about how the bodies came to be in unexpected places.

Lehrer tells the story in two tracks. The current historical and detective work centers on Dr. Don Spaniel of the National Park Service. The second track speaks to the reader with a voice from the 1880's in a remembrance of the bloody battle and the weight of events that happened there. Those events, while giving today's reader a good first hand account of the battle around Burnside's Bridge (Lehrer used the words of real participants), bear directly on Dr. Spaniel's efforts to unravel the mystery of the past.

The premise is great -- inspired by occasional findings of whole bodies at Civil War battlefields in recent years. The voices of the past reverberate with the horror an infantry charge into concealed positions must entail. The least satisfying part of the book is the present day detective work undertaken by the good Dr. Spaniel and other characters who pop into the story. I have to agree with one other commenter who thought they were flat and under developed. I also thought Lehrer had a tendency to have Dr. Spaniel over-react to other characters and occurrences in the story. This is a thin book, an instance where another forty or so pages could have led to more well-rounded characters -- and perhaps avoided their seemingly convenient popping into the story when needed.

Those criticisms noted, it is not a bad story. In fact, this is an engaging read. The story does move along quickly and the size of the book makes it an ideal candidate to polish off over a long rainy afternoon.

So there it is -- a great premise and an average story. Not bad, although I had the feeling that it could have been done a little better.