Deirdre McNamer shares this observation in Red Rover (Viking, $24.95) and, through the stories of a loosely connected group of elderly Montanans, demonstrates that in the best of circumstances, you "get near the end with the intimation that it all coheres."

Red Rover is McNamer's first book in eight years, and began as an effort to write a family memoir, she said last week in an interview.

The author often heard about an uncle - her father's brother - who had joined the FBI and been sent on a secretive mission to Argentina during World War II only to return with a debilitating illness and later be found dead in his apartment of a gunshot wound.

A coroner at the time told a newspaper reporter the death was a suicide, a conclusion that plagued McNamer's devout Catholic father but also conflicted with the death certificate, which ruled her uncle's death a probable accident.

"My uncle was a very well-liked son and brother, and my family could never get around [his death]," she says. "My father didn't believe he committed suicide, but there was never any official verdict."

McNamer, a former reporter who lives in Missoula, Mont., set out to solve the mystery in 2000 by obtaining her uncle's FBI file and other records through the federal Freedom of Information Act. She learned some disturbing details but never got to the end of the story. So several years into her research, she decided the write the story as a novel.

"When I did that, I gained all the great freedom fiction allows," she says.

It enabled her to create characters and construct a scenario for her uncle's death. It also gave her license to explore individual motivation and morality.

Red Rover ended up being a book not about solving a mystery, but "about what's involved in dealing with one, and about keeping faith," she says.

Aidan Tierney, the book's ill FBI agent, is based on McNamer's uncle; his brother, Neil Tierney, is based on her father. The initial chapters of the 264-page book pretty closely follow their experiences growing up in Montana and entering adulthood as an agent, in Aidan's case, and a B-29 bomber in Neil's case. But then to his great credit, she says, her father trusted her to fictionalize the rest of the story.

A real-life photograph of the two brothers as smiling boys on horseback riding just outside Shelby, Mont., graces the book cover. McNamer found the photo in a family album and hung it on the wall where she worked on the novel to keep her focused.

"There was something about the movement and sheer happiness of it that I really wanted to keep before my mind," she says. "The sadness of this story is in the falling away from the great freedom and blitheness of youth."

Red Rover unfolds as an engaging exploration of life's great disappointments and the emotional intelligence gained with age.

Through its characters, McNamer addresses, among other harsh realities, the hypocrisy of war, a reality particularly relevant today, she says.

"With any war, you can decide whether to go or not and what it means if you do. I'd be the last person to say people shouldn't follow their idea of bravery and patriotism," McNamer says. "But any war also has an element of people making money off it, and of innocent lives being squandered."

She considers the war in Iraq particularly problematic.

"It grieves me on a number of fronts, and my feelings about the war did infuse some of what I was thinking in writing this book."

Red Rover is about making sense of a single tragic event, and of life's tragedies in general.

But its lesson is that we can neither make sense of tragedy nor justify it. Instead, McNamer hopes she's shown there's "something interesting and valiant in the way people keep trying to wrangle with the meaning of it and its consequences."

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* LISA CARRICABURU can be reached at lisac@sltrib.com or 801-257-8716. Send comments about this story to livingeditor@ sltrib.com.

Reading, signing

* DEIRDRE McNAMER will read from her book Red Rover and sign copies Monday at 7 p.m. at The King's English Bookshop, 1511 S. 1500 East, Salt Lake City.

* THE EVENT is free and open to the public.

* INFORMATION: 801-484-9100.