Leading the cheers

by Justin Cartwright

"In this novel a London-based businessman, Dan Silas, surprises his thoroughly English self when he decides to attend this thirty-year high school class reunion. He has not, after all, in the past three decades had any inclination whatever to return to the school or the small Michigan town he happily left behind him in 1968.". "Dan finds himself neither immune to a rampant case of culture shock on his arrival in pastoral Hollybush nor in any way prepared for the faces he meets - particularly when he discovers that his old friend Gary Beaner has assumed the Ojibwa blanket and identity of Pale Eagle, a Shawnee who died in the disastrous 1813 Battle of Detroit, and that Gloria Swarthout, formerly a cheerleader and his high school sweetheart, is claiming Dan fathered her daughter. Dan doesn't meet his alleged daughter; she's been murdered by a serial killer." "Leading the Cheers explores the youthful dreams and unforeseen realities of its compassionately drawn characters at the same time t