SOURCE: "Sometimes, Even Good People Must Coexist With Evil," in Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1994, p. E4.

[In the review below, Harris comments on character and theme in Snow Falling on Cedars.]

David Guterson's haunting first novel [Snow Falling on Cedars] works on at least two levels. It gives us a puzzle to solve—a whodunit complete with courtroom maneuvering and surprising turns of evidence—and at the same time it offers us a mystery, something altogether richer and deeper.

In 1954, off the island of San Piedro in Puget Sound, salmon fisherman Carl Heine is found drowned and entangled in his boat's gill net. It seems to be an accident. Soon, however, darker suspicions bubble to the surface, and a fisherman of Japanese descent, Kabuo Miyomoto, is put on trial for murder.

Heine, the coroner discovers, has a fractured skull; before drowning, he hit his head on something, or...