LEWIS ROBINSON'S first novel, "Water Dogs," is stuffed with snow. Open practically any page of this book and crystals will shake out. "There was a dark blue heaviness to the air," Robinson writes, "that made it seem snow was minutes away." Or: "When they walked outside the temperature had dropped but the clouds were still hanging low in the sky, and what was falling now was that light, icy snow that sometimes falls for days at a time." Or: "With his eyes wide open in the dusk, through the blowing snow he could see their silhouettes blurring against the stands of spruce." Fiction writers have long turned to winter to advance bluer palettes, slicker surfaces and sharper contrasts. The sky darkens, the wind picks up and flakes start to fall. Horizons shrink. Couples bicker. Cars slide off roads. Obliteration tends to loiter between the sentences. Mary Shelley sent Frankenstein onto a glacier to confront his monster. Dickens juxtaposed Scrooge's wretchedness against the happy snow-shoveling of neighbors. Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Jack London, Sherwood Anderson, Lawrence Sargent Hall and Rick Bass - to name a few - have used winter to tunnel into the souls of protagonists. Perhaps no better example exists than the ending of James Joyce's story "The Dead," with its lonely churchyard and dissolving lamplight and snow "falling faintly through the universe." In "Water Dogs" it's early March 1997 in midcoast Maine, and a 26-year-old college dropout named Bennie Littlefield is playing paintball in the woods. It's cold, a blizzard is blowing in from the White Mountains, and Bennie, his brother and a friend hope to "blast hard and fast and to kill indiscriminately." Their opponents? Three urchin fishermen. "Glass-eating gorillas," Robinson pronounces them, "burly and tough and unpredictable." When the first two hours of paintballing end in a draw, the adversaries pound a beer and head back out to finish their game. Daylight fades. The storm arrives. Two of the urchiners creep through the snow toward Bennie, guns drawn. He shoots one; the other gives chase. Running hard, disoriented in semidarkness, Bennie sprints off a quarry ledge and knocks himself out on the ice below. When he comes to in a hospital bed, leg broken, head concussed, his brother informs him that he wasn't the night's only casualty. One of the urchin fishermen, a rookie paintballer named Ray LaBrecque, has gone missing. Maybe LaBrecque tumbled off a quarry ledge, too. Maybe he wrecked his motorcycle in the blizzard. Or maybe Bennie's brother knows more than he's letting on. In the chapters that follow, the novel assumes the structure of a mystery story. The reader watches Bennie crutch around with his Bowdoin-educated girlfriend, Helen, while they try to find out what happened to Ray LaBrecque. It's not until winter starts to give way, and the first rains of spring arrive, that answers begin percolating to the surface. For the most part, in "Water Dogs" Robinson sticks to what he excelled at in his first book, the story collection "Officer Friendly": socioeconomic oppositions, menacing undercurrents and small-town absurdities. He puts baby raccoons in the drywall, lets a drunk townie cop throw up in Bennie's living room and describes Bennie's deceased dad, a biathlon coach known as, well, Coach. Robinson is especially good at putting two characters at either end of a bar or boat or car or dartboard and letting them argue things out. He can be funny, too: when Bennie and Helen head up to LaBrecque's hometown to look for him, they find no fewer than seven Ray LaBrecques. "This guy here," a man named Zander tells them, "that's my second cousin Ray LaBrecque. We call him Dog....And that guy over there, the drunk guy with the green hat, he's Ray LaBrecque, too. They call him Sid, for some reason." To his credit, Robinson seems to realize how cutesy the ragtag investigation gimmick could become. (He even stocks Helen's childhood shelves with copies of "Encyclopedia Brown" and at one point has Bennie call her Nancy Drew.) Ultimately, though, a reader doesn't know all that much about Ray LaBrecque and therefore isn't terribly invested in whether he's found alive or dead. When "Water Dogs" succeeds it relies less on the narrative pull of the whodunit and more on Robinson's strengths. ENTER Bennie's brother, William: a 29-year-old belligerent whom everybody, including the narrator, calls Littlefield. Littlefield is the enigma in the novel: brooding, moody, obstinate. In high school he had no friends and "sold an ounce of weed every week." Now he owns a paintball gun and sleeps in the basement and harvests money out of Bennie's wallet whenever he feels like it. Bennie, on the other hand, is directionless but dutiful, paying bills and shoveling dead dogs into a crematorium for the local veterinarian. He has tried going to college, even tried living in New York for a while. And now, after his paintball accident, he feels "more awake, as though the brightness of the world had intensified." All through "Water Dogs" a wonderful tension revolves around place, with the particular question of Maine at its pivot. Bennie believes Littlefield has "completed the transformation from rich kid to local," but he's not so sure about himself. Can you be considered a real Mainer if your mother has money and grew up in Massachusetts? Can you be considered a townie if your girlfriend graduated from Bowdoin College? The most complex and therefore satisfying narrative force in this novel is Bennie's relationship with Maine itself. Robinson writes, "The Maine he knew was getting overhauled, burdened by interlopers and nostalgia-addled white-collar suburbs in the middle of the woods - Cumberland, Falmouth, Yarmouth, Brunswick, old towns with brand-new health stores and woodstove dealerships." Bennie knows he's not an interloper, but he's not sure he belongs to the place where he grew up, either. "Water Dogs" is not a dizzying, hugely ambitious novel. Robinson does not appear interested in punching holes in the hull of American literature. What he has created, though, is a quietly commanding book, one that exists mostly within itself. Robinson sets the novel in a post-Rwanda, pre-9/11 world, and a reader rarely feels any global forces encroaching on this Maine. No jets pass overhead, no letters come from faraway cousins. A reader waits for Robinson to make a larger metaphor out of paintball: here are young men playing at being soldier, while out in the larger country a lot of young men Bennie's age are a few years from being sent to Afghanistan or Iraq. And yet the novel never works to make its reader conscious of this. Perhaps "Water Dogs" feels honest in its insularity because it's wrapped so thickly in snow. Robinson clearly understands how to make a smudge of light glow against a dark background, how to negotiate winter's tandem essences of threat and beauty. In its rendering of the complicated, rich, mostly unspoken relationship between a young man and the place he lives, "Water Dogs" is a lovely novel. Robinson may not evoke the snow falling faintly through the universe, but he certainly evokes it as it falls over Maine. Anthony Doerr's most recent book is "Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World."

What are the limits of loyalty toward family? This seems to be the primary question underlying Robinson's debut novel, set in the dreary mud season of late winter in southern Maine. The three Littlefield siblings grew up in a competitive atmosphere-their father was always called "Coach" by everyone who knew him-But now that they are adults, will a crisis allow them to stick together? Or will the cruel truth about one brother's history emerge at last? Sister Gwen graduated from Vassar and is pursuing an acting career in New York. Her brothers reside in the crumbling family house on a small island in Maine. Younger brother Bennie tries to hold things together. Older brother Littlefield is a dark, brooding man who has only known two people in his life who have really understood him: his dad and sometime-girlfriend Martha. When an acquaintance of Martha's disappears during a snowstorm, the older brother is implicated, and this shines a blinding light on the Littlefield family's difficult past. Although it starts off slowly, the mystery of the snowy incident and the revelations from each of the characters' lives add up to an evocative story with a surprising conclusion. Recommended for public libraries where there is strong interest in regional writers of New England.-Susanne Wells, P.L. of Cincinnati and Hamilton Cty., OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Family dynamics exert a powerful pull underneath the surface of this debut novel about a game of paintball gone tragically awry. Robinson (Officer Friendly and Other Stories, 2003) stretches himself with a full-length narrative that initially doesn't seem to have much more plot than a short story. On Meadow Island, Maine, an isolated community in which everybody has known everybody forever, men who haven't quite left boyhood behind don't have much to do but work, drink and play paintball. The war game is an adrenaline rush for Bennie Littlefield and his older brother William, known to all simply as "Littlefield." As much as Bennie enjoys the weekly competition, he doesn't take paintball nearly as seriously as Littlefield does. After one of the daylong games ends in a disappointing tie, the teams regroup that evening amid a fierce blizzard to play to win. Bennie falls into a quarry, suffering a broken leg and a head injury, while a mysterious member of the opposition disappears. Did he die? Was he murdered? As circumstantial evidence implicates Littlefield, Bennie reflects on the family history that has brought them to this point. The brothers had an intensely competitive rivalry until the death of their father, a man of military bearing whom even his family called "Coach." Bennie exhibited promise that seems to have dissipated since he returned home after dropping out of college. Both Littlefield brothers have somehow become townies (the "water dogs" of the title), though their father's ambition and their mother's fortune had initially suggested a better future for them. Their mother and Bennie's twin sister have left the island, and relationships among the four are complex. ("Don't be intentionally clueless," his sister warns Bennie at one point.) A richly detailed yet elliptical work by an author who trusts readers to fill in the blanks. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Robinson's atmospheric and dreary first novel (after story collection Officer Friendly) revolves around a man gone missing in a blizzard. Bennie, a 20-something college dropout, scratches out a middling existence in rural Maine and lives with his taciturn brother, Littlefield, in their family's rotting mansion. The brothers don't have much going for them, and things get worse after a mishap during a paintball game. During the match, played during a blizzard, Bennie falls into a gorge and badly hurts himself, and a drifter member of the opposing team disappears. His body isn't recovered, and nobody's sure if he just picked up and left town or was murdered. But Littlefield and Bennie's friend Julian both call attention to themselves by behaving strangely, and when Bennie's twin sister, Gwen, comes back for a visit, she and Helen, a young woman working for Julian who catches Bennie's eye, help Bennie ferret out the truth about the missing man. Though the labored shifts between past and present detract from the narrative's understated power, Robinson does a magnificent job of painting a bleak and vivid picture of a rough-hewn community and the bonds that hold it together. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Bennie Littlefield is basically drifting through life as he nears the age of 27, working part-time at an animal hospital and trying to repair his family home on Meadow Island, Maine, where he lives with his older brother, William Jr., who's known simply as Littlefield. Having been trained in the biathlon by his late father, Bennie relishes paintball competitions, and during one of these games in the midst of a snowstorm, his life takes a turn. Bennie, trying to evade opposition shooters, is injured when he falls into a quarry, and a competitor, Ray LaBrecque, goes missing. Police investigating the disappearance focus on Littlefield because of his longtime interest in LaBrecque's girlfriend, while Bennie seeks proof of his brother's innocence. Unfortunately, it's hard to care much about the characters in Water Dogs (which the Meadow Islanders call themselves), and the book's narrative is annoyingly detailed and meandering, lacking the edge and tighter prose of his collection Officer Friendly and Other Stories (2003). A somewhat disappointing debut from a promising writer.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2008 Booklist