‘Weight of Blood’ a heart-pounding Ozark whodunit

Spiegel & Grau, $26, 320 pages

Henbane, Mo., sounds like a real hellhole, partly due to the many diabolical landmarks nearby: a ridge called Devil’s Backbone, a bottomless gorge known as Devil’s Throat and the “inky limestone labyrinth” of Old Scratch Cavern.

But nomenclature is the least of an ever-increasing list of worries for the denizens of this thorny village of the damned in Laura McHugh’s tantalizing debut, “The Weight of Blood.” The tightly plotted Ozark Mountain thriller opens with the discovery of a teenage girl’s body stuffed in the hollow of a tree in North Fork River — and things only get more gruesome from there.

For 17-year-old Lucy Dane, the novel’s spirited heroine, news of the murder packs a double whammy. Cheri Stoddard had once been Lucy’s friend, a developmentally disabled neighbor whose mother turned tricks in a trailer down the road. Lucy is disturbed not only that Cheri’s body has surfaced a full year after she vanished, but that it surfaced at all. In these parts, Lucy says, corpses are more likely to be fed to the hogs, dropped down abandoned wells or buried in the wilderness. She wonders why anyone would risk hiding the evidence in such an obvious spot across from the Dane family general store — unless the killer’s intent was to show off what he’d done. “The only reasonable explanation,” Lucy suggests, “was that an outsider was responsible, and outsiders bred fear in a way no homegrown criminal could.”

McHugh’s talent for heaping tension on top of an already merciless premise becomes apparent as the narration jumps back in time to another unsolved mystery: the disappearance of Lucy’s mother into Old Scratch Cavern a generation ago. Ill-fated Lila Petrovich had worn out her welcome in a string of Iowa foster homes before finding work in Crete Dane’s greasy spoon. Her striking appearance and power to enchant Crete’s younger brother, Carl (Lucy’s dad), had set Henbane’s tongues to wagging, the yokels swearing that the newcomer was a witch.

McHugh, who grew up in tiny rural towns in Iowa and Missouri, writes about the back-country residents of Henbane with comic exactitude — and exhaustive thoroughness. The community claims only 707 residents, but by the book’s midpoint we feel as if we’ve met half of them. Beyond its intriguing narrators, Lucy and Lila, the novel’s most colorful sideline characters are: Gabby, the pot-smoking bingo queen; Sarah Cole, the kindly village medicine woman; and Ransome, a morally conflicted field-hand who provides one of the book’s many jaw-dropping revelations.

Shades of folksy sentimentality creep into the writing, though only occasionally. The character of Birdie, the hillbilly midwife next door, is rendered with all the subtlety of Snuffy Smith’s long-suffering wife, Loweezy. But McHugh by and large treats her extensive cast as neither noble savages nor amoral trailer trash. The book bears witness to many violent truths — residents burned up in meth labs or assaulted by jealous lovers — as well as more routine details of small-town courtship and insularity.

The sordid ethical shortcomings of fictional Henbane seem to stem from a land cursed by the divine (despite it being called “God’s country,” one character points out). Lucy says the whole region is “a dark spot on the globe” where the rocky soil swarms with stinging beasts and the roads tangle “like intestines.”

In such an inhospitable landscape, strong family bonds gain extra urgency for survival. The Dane brothers, whose ancestral roots run deep, seem to fare much better than any of their neighbors. By contrast, Lila gets a harsh wake-up call after her parents are killed. With no blood relatives to turn to, she ends up hundreds of miles from home and trusting the generosity of strangers — which can come at a brutal cost.

Lucy, a native who is nonetheless treated differently due to her lost parent’s otherness, begins to contemplate the “weight” of blood relationships when her investigation into Cheri’s death deepens. Here, again, McHugh’s aptitude for plotting is commendable. Seemingly incidental choices in Lila’s storyline grow into mortal consequences for Lucy and her peers.

McHugh’s white-knuckled grip over the story structure loosens as new narrators come into play — a choice that’s only partially successful. What does work is the insertion of a plot device as old as suspense fiction itself: the time-tested doppelganger trope. Lucy, who already resembles her late mother, is given a box of Lila’s old clothes. With rapidly developing figure and similar hairstyle, Lucy begins to inadvertently startle folks who believe her to be Lila alive and looking just like she did the day she vanished.

While “The Weight of Blood” may not be a literary thriller, this page-turner’s moments of haunting, musical prose hint at bright — or rather, dark — things ahead for the first-time author. A few big-picture issues aside, McHugh choreographs macabre suspense like a veteran and shows a wicked talent for placing the devil in the details.