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From Flynn (North To Yesterday, Seasonal Rain), a colorful but predictable tale of a man's homecoming in a small Texas town. Will Callaghan is 50, lives in San Antonio, and writes booklets on various ethnic minorities for something called the Texas Institute for Cultural Research, where his boss kiddingly introduces him around as one of the last of a vanishing breed of old-time Texans. But when an old friend dies and Will has to return to his birthplace of Wanderer Springs, it really is as if he's going back in time as well as space, Wanderer Springs (setting for many of the stories in Seasonal Rain) is a little town bypassed years ago by the main high-way and choked off from prosperity, its inhabitants insular and backward-looking. Will narrates not only the particulars of his own past--the murder of his mother, his frowned-upon marriage to a Mexican gift, his years teaching high school in Wanderer Springs--but that of the town, from the pioneer days on. Thus there's a cast of thousands (Luster Cox, Tomoliver Turkett, Fat Sue, Una Bea, etc.), most of whom are quaint rather than real--and the folk tales themselves are deeply familiar in tone: ""When Ma Lance died Delmar decided he needed a wife so he went to Wichita Falls and got one."" The real story is Will's guilt over the drowning of his high-school sweetheart during a skinny-dipping party over 30 years before, and his lasting sorrow over the death of his wife in a car accident just after he revealed he'd been unfaithful to her. But by the time he leaves Wanderer Springs, Will has managed to come to peace with these ghosts, if not to exorcise them. Nothing surprising, but nicely written, and sometimes moving. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.