NORWICH– Endearing, funny, and smart; three unconventional, if not offensive (but possible), ways to describe local author Shelly Reuben’s newest novel about a nice man – who is incinerated in a fire. That’s the wonderful achievement of The Skirt Man. Set in Chenango County, it is a sometimes macabre mystery whose unusually large number of heroes force you, despite such a horrific premise, to witness the overwhelming good that still exists among mankind, and among the people of Reuben’s fictional village, Killdeer, N.Y.

“Sure there are evil shadows,” Reuben said. “But I like to show that my characters aren’t going to give up.”

In an optimistically suspenseful manner, her protagonists, narrator and news reporter Annie Bly, her husband, state police investigator Sebastian Bly, and brother Billy Nightingale, a New York City fire marshal, drive the reader through a calmly twisted terrain of horror, absurdity and compassion that is clipped with the local flavor of this area.

“There is a kind of spirit of the area,” Reuben said, explaining the book’s underlying, and not so subtle conflict between urban and rural ideals. “There is a sense of innocence, and a sense of the real world intruding on that rural identity.”

This diligent team, with the help of a few friends, search out the cause and possibly the killer(s) involved in the death of the affectionately weird skirt-wearing local farmer, Morgan Mason, when his charred remains are discovered by a famous TV personality.

The tale is brimming with diverse fictional characters, whose purposely unforgettable names carry very distinguishable identities. The number of well developed personalities leaves no trace of favoritism toward who the culprits could be, or why, and they provide for light bulb moments that may bring to the local reader’s mind a Chenango County resident they may know.