Crawfish Mountain

By Ken Wells

(Random House, 384 pages, $26)

In this fourth novel by Wells, a Condé Nast Portfolio senior editor and Louisiana native, someone is poisoning a beloved and remote fishing ground deep below the fictional Cajun town of Black Bayou. Suspicions arise that the culprit may be Big Tex, an oil company with a history of outlaw inclinations.

This isn’t of immediate concern to protagonist Justin Pitre, a boat mechanic who spends blissful weekends with his wife at a wetlands retreat he inherited from his trapper grandfather. But Pitre’s land, it turns out, is in the way of an urgent Big Tex pipeline project. When money can’t persuade Pitre to sell, the company applies a more nefarious sort of pressure. Pitre caves in but doesn’t give up, and an altercation looms.

Governor Joe T. Evangeline, a charming widower busy chasing skirts as an antidote to a midlife crisis, is dragged into this feud by sticky politics. The governor finds himself becoming a serious student of the wetlands when Julie Galjour, a top eco-lawyer, demands he step up and oppose another oil-company-supported act of environmental vandalism—creating a shipping channel that threatens commercial Cajun fishing grounds.

Evangeline is won over, and why not? Galjour, an unaffected beauty who graduated from Harvard, can give a speech. “It’s simple,” she tells him in one lively exchange. “If we lose the marsh, we’ve lost our lifestyle, and if we lose our lifestyle, we’ve lost our soul. The very term Cajun will become meaningless. We’ll just be another relic people working at tourist traps along I-10, selling CDs and cookbooks and alligator heads and reminiscing about the past.”

But can Pitre win back his land? And can the governor stare down Big Oil and save his budding romance? He might but for his secret, unsavory obligation to Big Tex, incurred during a tipsy junket aboard the corporate jet. Several sharp plot twists later, these characters and a satellite cast of do-gooders and lowlifes have come to know one another well. Though a farce reminiscent of Carl Hiaasen’s novels, the book has a point to make: that the eroding Cajun coast, a national treasure to rival the Everglades, is neglected and under siege. But the novel’s gravitas is served up easy, for Crawfish Mountain is at heart a study of Cajuns’ deep ties to the land that defines them.