A small-time art forger runs afoul of the New England mob in this comic crime novel from the author of The End of Vandalism : “One of our living masters” ( McSweeney’s ). Paul Emmons has his faults—envy, lust, naiveté, money laundering, and art forgery to name a few. A fallen accountant and scamster, Emmons and his wife, Mary, are exiled abroad, though they enjoy inadvisable returns to New England to check on the property they own but cannot claim. Paul’s unfortunate association with Carlo Record, president of the fraudulent company New England Amusements, was always destined to get him into trouble. When Carlo and his cronies—Ashtray Bob, Line-Item Vito, and Hatpin Henry—try to coerce Paul into stealing the John Singer Sargent painting “The Black Brook” from the Tate gallery in London, Paul and Mary hatch a plan to trick the tricksters . . . Through it all, Paul searches for his true mission in life in this “irresistibly droll portrayal of an All-American liar, loser, and innocent” ( Kirkus Reviews ). This Grove edition features a new introduction in the form of a conversation between Drury and Daniel Handler. “I’d say Drury was good and now he’s great, even revolutionary. The genius of The Black Brook is that in the current of banalities that engage us all, he finds compelling mystery. My hat is off to this superb writer.” — Barry Hannah “A trip and a treat.” — Kirkus Reviews “Tom Drury ranks right up there with fellow Connecticut writer Robert Stone when it comes to depicting the futility of American wanderlust.” — Boston Herald “Every page yields wonderful surprises—of invention, of insight, of language.” — Richard Russo Tom Drury is the author of Pacific , longlisted for the National Book Award; The End of Vandalism ; Hunts in Dreams ; and The Driftless Area . His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker , Harper’s , and The Mississippi Review , and he has been named one of Granta’s “Best Young American Novelists.” 1 It was a hot dry dusty summer day in New Hampshire. Mary and Paul Emmons had just taken a booth in a diner called Happy's when Mary noticed a dog in a car in the parking lot with its head turned upside down. "What's the matter with that dog?" she said. "Where?" said Paul. Mary touched the screen. Rust flakes fell to the windowsill. "Down there." "I don't see it." "I don't think it has enough air to breathe." "I don't see a dog." Paul and Mary were natives of the United States who had lived in Belgium for the past six years. Before that, they had owned a house in Providence, where Paul had been an accountant. Then he came under indictment and eventually testified in a well-publicized criminal trial, for which the federal government gave him a new identity. When the trial was over, Mary and Paul moved to Spokane. But they did not like Spokane, things did not work out so well for them there, and after seven months in Spokane they got on a plane and flew to Belgium, where Mary had relatives whom she had visited during her childhood summers. Mary and Paul ended up living and working in a modest hotel in the Ardennes. Mary managed the inn and Paul kept the books, and between them they had to perform every sort of hotel duty except fixing the electrical wiring. It felt like, and was, a life in exile. Paul had more guilty knowledge than Mary, but Mary had some too. She was not a CPA but she understood numbers. They had been warned never to come back to New England, but this was the third time they had done so. The urge to return is great among protected witnesses, and the more Paul and Mary came back, the less threatened they felt. They drove past their old house in rented cars with their arms resting in open windows. It was a shame how the place had fallen apart, with tall scorched grass and sagging gutters. They visited Paul's family down in South County, neither making a show of their presence nor trying to hide. In movies it may seem that gangsters have nothing better to do all day than hunt down and shoot turncoat accountants, but in the Emmonses' experience the opposite was true. During these rare visits to the States, however, Paul and Mary found it difficult to get along with Paul's family. His mother and father, and especially his aunts and uncles and cousins, seemed both jealous of Mary's Belgian relatives and hostile to Mary and Paul themselves. The truth is Paul's family had never been that wild about Mary, who even before her banishment among French speakers would lapse into French for no particular reason. And Paul had thrown a cloud over the family, first by conspiring to racketeer and then by informing on people who had once considered him, if not their friend, at least their associate. After a week of visiting Paul's relatives in Rhode Island, Mary and Paul were always more than ready to drive up to New Hampshire, where they owned thirty-nine acres of maples and meadows and evergreens, not far from Carr Mountain and the Polar Caves. A waitress in red shorts and a white