The Blaze by Chad Dundas

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 384 pages, $26

If you’ve got a good gimmick, (almost) all is forgiven. Chad Dundas has a good gimmick for “The Blaze.” His main character, Matthew Rose, suffered brain injury while a soldier in Baghdad. He has been returned to the U.S. without proper treatment for the amnesia that was a result of a bomb explosion. What Matthew Rose has is a pretty complete loss of who he is. Friends, family, colleagues are strangers to be met again. If they liked or loved him, he doesn’t remember. If they didn’t, he is easy prey.

After returning to live with his mother and stepfather in Florida, Matthew is too lost to seek proper treatment, to fight against government bureaucracy, to get help. He is traumatized by the war and by the loss of people he doesn’t remember but mourns anyway. Then Matthew’s father dies.

Matthew returns to Missoula, Montana, where he grew up, to attend to his father’s affairs, such as they are for a piss-poor poet and alcoholic. He meets people he should know intimately. He fakes it sometimes and at other times he admits his disability. But he senses there is something very wrong about his reaction to his hometown. He is uncomfortable. People tell him he was a sullen teenager, a boy who raged against his father, a man who abruptly left town to join the military. Even his closest friends, Georgie Porter and Scott Dorne, are at a loss to help him figure out what had soured him on the place. 

Georgie is now a reporter. She was his girlfriend for a while, but they broke each other’s hearts. His silence hurt her worst of all. As teenagers Scott and Matthew got high together, passed the time, and then parted, each no wiser than before about what the other was going through. Scott is now a janitor at the college in which his father is a professor. The connection between Matthew and his ex-friends is awkward, but they seem willing to help him solve the mystery of what happened when Matthew was a teenager.

As Matthew meets more people, he vaguely feels his unease has to do with a store fire that took place when he was about twelve years old. That makes no sense because the store was a beloved hangout for the kids and the neighborhood families. His, Georgie’s, and Scott’s families would discuss community politics and how to “stick it to the man” in the backyard of the store while the kids played.

Matthew decides to pack up his father’s meager possessions but instead comes across a break-in at his father’s home. The intruder escapes and Matthew almost dies in an ice-encrusted river trying to catch the person. What could be so valuable among his father’s ratty things? This also makes Matthew aware how unusual it was to have arrived just the day before and to have happened upon a house fire not far from where he used to live. A young university student, Abbie Green, died in the fire. Matthew does not know her, but to be fair, he does not know whether he knew her. It seems unlikely, nevertheless. Could the candy store fire over a decade ago have anything to do with the recent house fire? It wouldn’t be a normal person’s first reaction, but this is a mystery book, so the answer is: maybe.

The amnesia thing carries the book pretty far. Is Matthew talking to someone who is lying or telling the truth? helpful or distracting? a killer or worse? As snippets of Matthew’s memory emerge, they begin a slow illumination of the horrible story that underlies why Matthew left town.

When I wasn’t hollering “Call 911!” or “Don’t go into the forest!” or “Has that gun been oiled recently?” I enjoyed the contrivance. FYI, my personal sense of self-before-others would not have allowed much of what Matthew kept saying yes to. But then I’m not in a mystery book or a Hitchcock movie*.

*Seriously, I still check the upper lighted windows of the motel for a mummified corpse rocking in a chair.