White Crosses

Written by Larry Watson

Narrated by Beau Bridges

Larry Watson's previous fiction evoking contemporary Western small-town life has won him awards, a dedicated readership, and unqualified critical praise. Now he has written a novel that envelops the rich emotional terrain of his beloved Montana in a mystery that is both unexpected and unforgettable.

After a nighttime accident at the bottom of Sprull Hill in Bentrock, Sheriff Jack Nevelsen is compelled to try and protect a part of his hometown that even a hero would have trouble saving -- its innocence. For most everyone in the community would agree that June Moss, the quiet girl who had just graduated from high school, and Leo Bauer, the principal of Bentrock Elementary and a married man like Jack, had no business heading out of town together.

As Jack sets out to unravel the mystery of their deaths, he begins to create a story to shield his town, a lie that will reverberate throughout an entire community, and into the shadows of his own heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Jun 1, 1997
• ISBN: 9780743549592

Larry Watson

Larry Watson was born in Rugby, North Dakota and raised in Bismarck. He is the recipient of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, a National Endowment of the Arts award, and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association Regional Book Award. Watson teachers English at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Points.

Reviews for White Crosses

[hope_h-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Slow moving and introspective, this tells the story of Jack Nevelsen, the sheriff in Bentrock, Montana, who tries to hold the town together after the elementary school principal dies in car accident with a teenage girl.

[stuartaston · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Set in Montana in 1960 the story is focused around the town of Bentrock after the high school has closed for the year after graduation.Normally the local sheriff, Jack Nevelsen, only has to deal on this night with drunken graduates and parties that last too late into the night. However tonight brings him a car accident and one that will have consequences for the town if they know that the local school principal is running away with one of the local teenage girls.Jack devises a story that would stop this happening though. He sees this as part of his duties to save the morals of the town and will do anything to have met every duty he needs to uphold. However as time passes the story seems to cause more problems as it gains its own life. Does the wife of the principal know the truth? Of the the teenage girls friends wants to make placards telling the town the story is a lie....and the uncle of the girl wants to take revenge on this death by using his gun.In the end wherever Jack looks he sees possible problems to his story and places where the truth could come out. He becomes paranoid to a point that he constantly keeps checking the town for groups of teenagers who may be telling the true story behind the accident. All because he was trying to keep the town safe and the morals pure.In the end though he pays the ultimate price to keep the town safe. And finds at the same time that for some people the truth was not such a problem as he thought it would be.A nice read...no real "hard hitting" storyline though. Once you have the accident and the dead bodies at the start the rest is all down to how in 1960 the idea of an older man and a younger woman was dealt with.

[richardderus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

No good deed goes unpunished. Lies are clearer than glass. The truth will out.Every one of those nostrums is the god's-honest truth, and forgetting them...worse still, ignoring them...worst of all, setting out to disprove them...will cause more harm than the unpalatable truth ever could. Pain of an order that mere embarrassment, petty humiliation will render positively desirable attends every effort at concealment of the ugly facts of life.People don't fall out of love; they fall in it and, like Archimedes in his bath, discover that a large weight dropped into a limited volume of sloshable stuff results in losses over the sides of the delimiting container. The only limit to the sloshing damage is the relative size of the container to the added thing.Poor little June, poor old Leo: starting out and ending up at the same moment. It is heart-hurtingly obvious to me, old and battered and cynical, that desperation rode their backs. Leo, last-love lorn, couldn't accept that he was done. June, blooming in the delicious and addictive admiration of The Older Man, wouldn't even recognize the hopelessness of escape from yourself.When I read this in 1997, I was shattered. The carnage and the mayhem that these two blinded-by-desperation souls wreaked in their passage out of town left me muttering and fulminating and all too aware of my own sins of omission and commission. "How can you not see!" when what I meant was "why did I not see?" and the list of wrongs, slights, inconsideratenesses yawned before my appalled feet. The best stories show you yourself; the best writers make you take it with good grace.This is the best story told by the best writer.

[casabooks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Complex interplays, should we attempt to “alter” for another’s sake ?
and what do we really know about what’s for their sake ?
Read in 2006.