Straight out of Grant Wood and Norman Rockwell comes the sleepy burg of Rising Sun: respectable folk, solid businesses, a reputable weekly newspaper, a diner called the Milky Way that serves up old-fashioned home cooking, a mayor from whom you would buy a used car - it even has a town millionairess, the eccentric dowager Edna Kane. In other words, a town just waiting to be corrupted.

When Edna Kane announces that she will donate several million dollars as a memorial to her grandson, Powell Kane - who had been kidnapped a decade earlier as a mere toddler and is now presumed dead - the stage is set. Everyone in Rising Sun has a clear idea of exactly how that money should be spent, from total tax abatement to new sidewalks to a fancy new fountain in the town park.

Enter a drifter and heavy-metal cartoonist named Dusseau and a scrawny, asthmatic, twelve-year-old kid called Paul, a dreamer who reads Dostoyevsky and Swamp Thing with equal passion. The two pull in to the Milky Way Cafe for dinner one rainy night in a battered van with Deathwind painted on its side. Chance, in the form of a day-old issue of the Rising Sun Times, entices them to stay. Dusseau knows a golden opportunity when he sees it.

At the town meeting a few days later he announces that the boy he has in tow is none other than Powell Kane, the dowager's long-lost grandson. He's even got the birthmark to prove it. From that point on the town is never quite the same. Is Paul really Powell? If so, where has he been these past ten years? Who was his kidnapper, and why was the ransom money never picked up? And who is the mysterious Dusseau, and what exactly is the relationship between him and young Paul? Again, everyone in town has an opinion, including Edna Kane.

Is Dusseau's claim legitimate, or is this the biggest potential scam in the history of Rising Sun? In the lineage of Twain's Huck Finn and Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Thomas Gavin's new novel is a classic brew of innocence and perfidy, comedy and suspense - with a few stumpers about the nature of identity thrown in. Paul's voice picks up where Holden Caulfield left off and makes Breathing Water an immersion experience no reader will soon forget.