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From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. From the outset of this heartbreakingly powerful contemporary noir, Stokoe (High Life) gets the reader deeply emotionally invested in his guilt-ridden narrator, Johnny Richardson. Eight years after leaving his hometown of Oakridge, Calif., in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Johnny returns to face the consequences of a reckless youthful act. Instead of keeping an eye on his then 11-year-old brother, Stan, during an outing to a local lake, Johnny slipped off with his girlfriend, Marla, into the surrounding woods. Left alone, Stan, a smart kid but a poor swimmer, suffered brain damage after nearly drowning in the lake. In the present, Johnny and Marla reconnect, but a suicide prompted by sexual betrayal leads to more deaths. When Stan and Johnny's widowed father disappears, Johnny must look after his brother on his own. Stokoe stays true to a bleak vision of the world as he enmeshes his characters in the kinds of tragic setups reminiscent of a Thomas Hardy novel.
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Johnny Richardson returns to Oakridge, California, his hometown, after eight years of self-imposed exile. His inattention allowed his younger brother, Stan, to nearly drown and suffer brain damage, and Johnny's guilt hasn't diminished with time. He resumes his relationship with Marla, his former lover, and agrees to help Stan start a business to lease and maintain decorative plants in the gentrifying former gold rush town, but his own emotional burdens and other events soon lead to suicide, murder, and existential threats to Johnny and the people he cares about. Empty Mile recalls the early David Lynch films Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, which dwelled on sordid and creepy events in picturesque small towns. Stokoe, like Lynch, portrays Oakridge as a place of stunning beauty that happens to house a roiling cauldron of human jealousy, venality, depravity, and violence. His pace may be a bit too measured. Some crime fans might lose patience, but as the threats mount, he'll have readers right where he wants them: by the throat. --Thomas Gaughan