Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo has turned to writing mysteries late in his career, and he is great at it. His latest, Under the Falls, hooked me in a way that fiction rarely does anymore. I finished the novel in a few days while on a recent business trip.

Russo has made a career from novels about life in small, rural, Northeastern former factory towns that are now economically depressed. The towns are in upstate New York and nearby states. The novels draw from Russo’s own life and the main characters are often men with working class upbringings, fathers who are unreliable, distant and charismatic and mothers or wives who are mentally ill. Despite these dark themes, Russo fills his books with joie de vivre and humor. They are fun reads.

The main character of “Under the Falls” is Tyler Sinclair, who left Stone Mountain, New York, a depressed, isolated hamlet in the Catskill Mountains, at age 18, carrying only a duffel bag, his guitar, and some money he swiped from his father. Twenty years later, Sinclair is a world-famous, wealthy superstar singer-songwriter. Sinclair’s band is named Stone Mountain and their songs are about life in that town. But Sinclair has cut off all ties with the town where he grew up. When he gets mail with a Stone Mountain postmark, he throws it out unopened.

Sinclair’s manager has arranged for the band to launch their world tour in Stone Mountain, with a one-night-only charity concert to pay a childhood friend’s medical bills. Sinclair reluctantly agrees.

At first, the return goes well. Sinclair reconnects with his friend. The concert seems successful at first, but quickly becomes a riot, followed by a murder. Sinclair is nearly killed himself, clinging to life in a hospital, trapped in Stone Mountain and forced to confront his past, as well as a local crime ring.

I read a few reviews of “Under the Falls” that point out multiple flaws and plot holes. I didn’t notice them when I read them and I don’t care about them now. It’s not Russo’s best work — I love his “Fool” trilogy best — “Nobody’s Fool,” “Everybody’s Fool” and “Somebody’s Fool — but “Under the Falls” is damn fine.

As I read the book, I wondered how Russo would handle the music. Russo himself has shown no musical talent in interviews and public appearances. Unlike Stephen King (whose work Russo surprisingly resembles), music is not a powerful feature of his novels. “Under the Falls” simply sidesteps the problem. We don’t get descriptions of Sinclair’s singing, his songs, or details about his songwriting process. I think that’s a wise choice — that kind of thing is tedious in fiction. As the saying goes, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Even die-hard “Lord of the Rings” fans hate the music in those books.

Like the fictional Sinclair, Russo grew up in a depressed small town, made an international reputation telling stories about the life he left behind, but mostly severed ties with the place he grew up.

I’ve been fascinated by Russo novels for more than 30 years. The town where he grew up, Gloversville, NY, is the basis of the settings for many of his novels. Interestingly, even though Gloversville is tiny and far from anywhere I’ve ever spent much time, I have known people with connections to that place. One is a woman who grew up there and has traveled the world and had multiple, exotic careers; when I learned she was from Gloversville, she was reluctant to talk about it and seemed to think it was weird for me to ask. I think she, like Tyler Sinclair, had remade herself and want to leave her old home in the dead past. I am probably just imagining that.