On an early autumn morning in 1954, a dense fog smothers the quiet streets of Amity Harbor on the island of San Piedro, a community of five thousand tucked among Washington’s San Juan islands. The silence of its thick cedar forests and winding roads is permeated only by the echoes of the waves of the Pacific; the island stands undisturbed. Though quiet and unremarkable on the surface, San Piedro is, in reality, a pressure cooker, its citizens embroiled in and divided by deeply-rooted, hushed racial tension.

Tangled in the net of a schooner off the coast is the body of respected fisherman Carl Heine. His pocket watch, frozen some five hours before, reads 1:47 AM.

Three months later, Japanese-American war veteran and fellow fisherman Kabuo Miyamoto, accused of murdering Heine, sits at the defendant’s table of the Amity Harbor courthouse as a snowstorm — the island’s first in decades — brews outside. Prosecutor Alvin Hooks implores the jury to look into the eyes of the defendant to see a ruthless killer. The evidence mounts against Miyamoto, but the accused remains stoic, unfazed by the crowd’s stares.

Emotionally overwrought but outwardly detached, reporter Ishmael Chambers, robbed by the war of his left arm a decade before, anxiously watches the litigation from the gallery, his eyes fixed on Hatsue Imada, his estranged former lover and the wife of the defendant. In his coat pocket, he hides the evidence that proves Miyamoto innocent. As the trial comes to close, his conscience teeters on the boundary between moral duty and long-festering, indiscriminate hatred.

David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars is a magnificent examination of prejudice and cultural conflict in a setting rarely covered by the genre: the post-World War II Pacific northwest. Though in the same vein as American classics like To Kill a Mockingbird, Snow Falling feels unique in that the societal issues it discusses go well beyond racism. Through romance, heartbreak, deception, and violence, Snow Falling on Cedars examines the irreconcilable incompatibility of the island’s Japanese and American cultures at a sensitive time in history.

Through flashbacks, the novel investigates the intricately intertwined pasts of each character in the trial — Chambers, Imada, and Miyamoto — unraveling each like an onion and slowly revealing the roots of the tension within the community. The author spares no expense in painting the scene of the story; Guterson describes the comings and goings of Amity Harbor and its inhabitants in great, meticulous detail.

Snow Falling on Cedars comfortably fills 460 pages and as a consequence feels rather slow. Though intimidating early on, its density and deliberate pacing makes for a particularly satisfying conclusion. After laying out the island’s idealistic beauty and the circumstances of the trial in the opening chapters, Guterson builds pressure with each passing page. It is easy to get lost in the novel’s extensive (and admittedly beautiful) detail — one page becomes fifty quite quickly. For readers seeking subtlety, density, and drama, I wholeheartedly recommend Snow Falling.