Highway Robbery is a familiar story, set against an unfamiliar background. How much you enjoy it will depend a lot on your level of tolerance for the first, and your level of interest in the second. The hero, Owen Allison, is a civil engineer who (temporarily) leaves behind an unhappy life in California to return to his West Virginia hometown. Excavation for a new road has turned up what may be the body of his father—the incorruptible chief engineer of the county highway department, swept away by a flood-swollen river decades before—and his “accidental” death is starting to look like murder. Owen’s amateur sleuthing, and the exposure of other long-buried things, leads to murder and the threat of murder, confessions, and revelations about who people are (or were) when nobody’s watching.

Billheimer deftly handles the West Virginia locales, the brooding presence of the past, and the awkwardness of coming home after a long time away. The political and business shenanigans on which the plot turns are fresh and fascinating. The mystery is complicated and the clues innovative, but the process of working it all out feels stale and perfunctory. Nearly all the lives in the story (with one gratuitous, awkward exception) follow utterly predictable arcs, and most of the revelations are more surprising to the characters than they will be to longtime mystery readers. The identity of the murderer, and the climactic confrontation, feel particularly slack; you’ve seen it before, done better, in the last ten minutes of a hundred different TV episodes.

After the shaky climax, however, the book ends by playing to its strengths, winding down with a pair of sharply observed scenes where the gulf between Owen and the place he left behind closes a little. That, and the good bits that went before, was enough to leave me wanting to pick up another Owen Allison story sometime. ( )

No idea where or why I got this one, but this is another mystery I'm going to have to search for more books by the author. Hero's an engineer. Civil engineer, but still. I have a weakness for engineers. Much about local government corruption. Decades-old murder, and emotional angst in the hero's personal life. ( )