Review: On the road in France and Italy with David Downie's unforgettable expat.

The author of "Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light" is back with a new novel. Read it.

Clear, Cool, Sweet Water: A Late-in-Life Love Story, by David Downie. Amazon, $8.99 (Kindle)

Part road novel, part love letter, part drone chase — Downie sends his eccentric expat careening from France to Italy with a killer nephew on his tail and Petrarch in his pocket.

Robert Martin has vanished from his village in eastern France, and nobody can agree on whether it’s suicide, escapade, or murder. His estranged wife Laure — retired researcher, instinctive sleuth — isn’t buying any of the official theories. She knows Robert too well: his obsessions with riddles, with cats, with the medieval poet Petrarch. There’s a method to this particular madness. She sets off after him, crossing the Alps into Italy, retracing a shared past and, perhaps, reclaiming a shared future.

But the novel’s dark engine is Luke, the true-believing nephew dispatched from California to silence his uncle — conversion or murder, he’ll take either. Luke carries the weight of his father’s evangelical empire and the desperation of a man who cannot afford family secrets to surface. He tracks Robert, and then both of them, with a killer combat drone, which Downie makes feel inevitable. It’s a dark shadow of both Ukraine and Iran.

Against this menace, Downie sets a love story tender enough to break your heart. Laure isn’t chasing a missing person — she’s chasing the man she married, the one still worth finding. The title comes from a Petrarch sonnet, and that’s exactly right: this is a book about longing, about the beloved always slightly out of reach, about the journey being the point.

Downie conjures a wild, sun-drenched romp with real teeth. Devotion, fanaticism, and a combat drone make surprisingly good traveling companions. Clear, Cool, Sweet Water is funny, frightening, and shot through with Petrarchan longing — which, it turns out, is all you need for a road trip. I read it in one sitting.

A long-time resident of France and Italy, Downie has a large body of fiction and non-fiction that I have found worth every minute I’ve spent reading them. At the top of the list I always place “Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light,” a guidebook of his Paris adventures that was my most memorable introduction to my favorite city. He now lives in Burgundy and Italy with his wife, photographer Alison Harris.

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My next novel, Paris Reckoning, will be out in weeks.

John Pearce
Washington / Paris