Not the Killing Kind

“Blood floated on top of the carpet as though hesitant to soak in, sorry for the mess. No war zone here. Here, a family room in northern California, 2009. A misty morning in redwood country, in a town where you could expect not to get killed if you minded your own business.

“Someone tidied this little house neat as a church nave. Except for the knife gone from its block. Except for droplets of the boy’s blood flung on the couch cover, scattered up the breakfast bar. Except for the blood pooling under his neck. …

“I knew him. I’d watched him and my son wrestle in my front yard when they were both in middle school. He could’ve been my boy.”

Not the Killing Kind grips readers by the throat from those first paragraphs. And does so while dealing with substantive issues: racism, human trafficking, adoption, and abandonment.

Ana ‘Boots’ Marez is head of school at an alternative school in northern California’s coast-redwood country, and single mom to Jaral, an 18-year-old boy she adopted when he was 12. They’ve had their ups and downs in their six years as a family. Lately they’ve been in an “up.”

Until the day a month before Jaral’s high-school graduation when he shoplifts prenatal vitamins and gets caught by the drug store owner. When Boots quizzes him, fearing a pregnant girlfriend, Jaral ays, “I’m handing something, Moms. Start grounding me tomorrow.”

Jaral doesn’t come home that night. The next Boots hears from him is a panicked call: his friend Nando is dead, throat slashed. Boots is at school; Nando’s mother is in the classroom with her.

By the time Boots and Nando’s mom reach Nando’s house, the police are there, and Jaral is gone. Which makes him, a “brown boy” like Nando though a US citizen, the prime suspect.

As Boots frantically tries to figure out where Jaral is and what happened, a parent-controversy threatens to tear apart the school she founded to help immigrant children, forcing her to choose between her passion and livelihood, and her son. Then the worst happens: the police find Jaral. He is jailed and then put in solitary confinement.

In order to find who killed Nando and free Jaral, Boots must trespass into the “White Zone,” an area of federal land set aside for secretive CIA purposes on a mountainside outside their small town. At night, on her own, parachuting into a clearcut in the redwoods. What Boots finds there forces her to confront who she is and what she will do to protect her son.

Not the Killing Kind is Kelson’s first novel, but you wouldn’t know it. She ratchets up the tension so smoothly that readers simply won’t be able to put the book down. Boots and Jaral come alive on the page: She, a mom hampered by the unresolved pain of her own mother’s abandonment when Boots was a tween; he carrying all of the cockiness and awkward wisdom of a teenager who shares his mom’s ideals and love, but isn’t quite sure he can live up to her.

Kelson’s poetry background shows in the careful word choices and sensory richness throughout the narrative, particularly in descriptions of place:

“In a redwood forest at night, there are smells like my mother’s Cote D’Azur Avon Body Splash mixed with rainwater sluiced off roofs and a used-up tin of tobacco. Smells like the feel on your tongue when a lady in a TV commercial rips a rinsed head of lettuce in half and droplets fly everywhere. Spice smells, root smells, cardamom and carrots.”

Pick up Not the Killing Kind and prepare for a wild, lyrical, and very compelling read.