Knopf
Published August 11, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Why does Tyler Sinclair dread going home to Stone Mountain, the upstate New York town he left at age eighteen? Now that he’s a highly successful singer-songwriter performing in a duo under the name Stone Mountain, he has been persuaded by his agent and partner in music to return for a concert to benefit Doc, a former friend who landed in a wheelchair years ago after a teenage accident. As they drive up the mountain, he’s filled with a sense of doom, and the reception he receives bears out his reluctance. A lot of residents of the hardscrabble rural community resent the man who left as soon as he could and now uses their name, getting rich and famous by singing songs that evoke their hardscrabble lives. When he is about to sing his signature tune, “Under the Falls,” he’s interrupted, pelted with eggs, and when he freezes up has to be dragged off stage for his own protection. Why do they hate him so much? What was he running from when he left all those years ago without a word to his friends?
This short novel has the hallmarks of Russo’s fiction. It’s set in a rusting town in rural upstate New York, where the author grew up, and features a cast of damaged characters who don’t always act in their own best interest, their decisions sideswiped by past injuries and close but complicated relationships dogged by resentment, guilt, and anger. Before Tyler left Stone Mountain to write music, he lived with a violent father, shamed by his inability to protect his mother from him. He played a role in Doc’s accident, and he betrayed his friend Curt, who was dating the beautiful Freddi. Now Doc is somehow involved in shady criminal activities, Freddi is his caregiver and co-conspirator, and Curt, married to Freddi, is the police chief, determined to avert his eyes from whatever it is that Doc and Freddi are up to. Tyler’s return brings Doc’s accident and Tyler’s betrayal to the surface, depth charges that explode these relationships in unexpected ways, leading to tragedy and violence. It’s up to an outsider, a young and talented police officer mentored by Curt, to resolve the tangled situation.
According to an author’s note, Under the Falls was initially planned as a screenplay, refashioned into a novel when a writers’ strike ended that venture. Though the author is both a gifted novelist and a screen writer, this character-driven crime novel is somewhat less developed than his usual fiction. The character of Freddi, especially, is hard to read, driven by a sizzling fuse of anger but, unlike the author’s deep investigation into the experiences and motivations of Curt and Tyler, is obscured by the distance between the character and the reader.
That said, this is a Richard Russo novel, and the world he creates, peopled by damaged characters whose lives are sympathetically and richly portrayed, is well worth a visit.