Tom “T” Walker is a 57-year-old divorced businessman, a guy whose life has never gone the way it should have, partially because of his poor judgment and partially because of a vengeful ex-wife. Alone and lonely, he decides to take some time away to a favorite childhood haunt. On the way, he picks up two hitchhikers, Jen and Lester, even though his judgment (rightfully) tells him not to. The split-second decision will change the lives of all three of them.

Such is the premise of Edward Falco’s novel, Wolf Point. Falco is the author of the excellent Saturday Night in the Church of the Piranha, a collection of stories. In Wolf

style=´´mso-bidi-font-style: ´ normal´> Point, Falco brings his spare yet thoughtful writing to the story of three people who have gotten lost along the way. All three have the chance at redemption, yet all three also have the odds stacked against them.

This is Falco’s greatest gift: the surface of the story brims with tension, as Lester is clearly a loose cannon for whom drugs and guns, both of which he possesses, don’t mix well. Jen is an enigma; is she with Lester, or is she really interested in T? Where are her loyalties, and what are her motivations? And will T’s attraction to Jen push Lester over the edge?

But that’s not the only tension, although that alone is enough to carry a novel. T’s backstory, which has direct implications on his present behavior, rises periodically through the novel, showing us where T came from and the devils he’s dealing with, and the tension of the plot is ratcheted up with the tension of wondering if he can overcome his past, his actions and those of others, to become a different kind of person.

Falco’s writing style is spare and precise, but every word is weighted. Witness a chapter opening in which T wakes up slowly:

“T lay in bed looking up at Lester, who stood over him pointing a gun at his head. He had awakened to Lester tapping the barrel of the gun gently but persistently against his forehead, as if knocking softly on a closed door. He had awakened calmly and fully, with a sense of simply appearing in a dark room in the middle of a scene. First he wasn’t there. Then he was…What light there was in the room, the light in which T watched Lester’s expression, came from outside, through the open window, from the bright fields of stars and an orange moon that hovered low and full on the horizon.”

Falco is one of the rare writers who shines both with short fiction and in novels, and for that, his readers are grateful.