Two heads are better than one in Quinn Connor's "The Pecan Children," a Southern Gothic supernatural yarn that might remind some readers of V.C. Andrews.
Set around a dying small town in a corner of the Deep South, "The Pecan Children" follows twin sisters, Lil and Sasha. Lil, a spinster, runs the family pecan orchard, like her mother and her family before her for generations. She's rooted in the place.
Sasha broke away to attend the Savannah College of Art and Design and became an art photographer in New York. After a bad breakup, she came home to help Lil. Now, she runs the local ferry; the town's one bridge washed out years ago and is in a chronic state of repair. She also fills in at some of the town's few remaining businesses.
The town -- we never learn its name -- has been trapped in a kind of time warp for 30 years. One by one, the locals die or move away to retirement homes. Theron, the sinister, wrinkle-suited representative of some anonymous power, has been buying up the surrounding pecan orchards.
Only Lil holds out; she has a secret duty -- tending a magical pecan tree deep in the woods. It yields golden pecans, whose kernels impose both blessings and curses.
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The story is launched when two other old residents return. Jason, the love of Lil's life, returns for his father's funeral and lingers to clear up the estate. He had been the town's golden boy but left to go to law school (apparently at Duke) and never came home. He begged Lil to come with him, but she wouldn't.
And Sasha's best friend Autumn -- who left for culinary school -- has turned back up, reopening the town bakery. Autumn and Sasha had a moment, eating hash brownies and sharing dark secrets off in a tree house after high school graduation. Now, she has to confront her own dark secrets.
Meanwhile, the town is being afflicted by "ghost fires." Old houses and even public buildings seem to erupt into flames -- only to be left standing, moments later, as if nothing happened.
Autumn discovers the secret of the old legend of the "Pecan Children," supposedly burned by fellow pecan trees without parents. A small tribe of feral kids is camped off in the woods, building bird traps and hiding from someone or something called "the Hungry Man."
Jason and Lil concoct a plan to save the town by reviving its old Pecan Festival. But all things aren't what they seem.
The novel's plot and mythology grow complex, but Connor manages to juggle it all and build, slowly, to a suspenseful climax.
"Quinn Connor," by the way, is two people: Robyn Barrow, an art historian from Arkansas, and Alex Cronin, a Texan now working in New York. The two met as students at Rhodes College in Memphis and have been collaborating ever since.
Collaborators with a collective pseudonym are an old tradition: "Ellery Queen" was really Frederic Dannay and Bennington Lee, while "Charles Todd" was the mother-and-son mystery writing team of Caroline and Charles Todd. Barrow and Cronin promise to be just as successful.
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Book review
The Pecan Children
By Quinn Connor
Sourcebooks Landmark, $16.99 paperback
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