Hawkes Harbor by S. E. Hinton (2004, Hardcover)

S.E. Hawkes Harbor "adult" novel, "Hawkes Harbor," is her first major work in more than 20 years. Rather than a triumphant return by a much-beloved writer, it's a shambles. It's hard to imagine any first-time readers, adult or otherwise, being captivated by this rambling, episodic mess.

Jamie Sommers, the novel's protagonist, is in many ways a typical Hinton character brought to a rather shaky maturity: feckless and lacking direction, essentially goodhearted but easily led astray. Jamie is an orphan, raised by cruel nuns in the Bronx. He attends high school, then has a three-year stint in the Navy. A life on the ocean waves appeals to young Jamie, and after his naval service he takes up with Kellen Quinn, a silver-tongued Irish gunrunner, smuggler and general ne'er-do-well who is by far the novel's best-drawn character. There's an odd, naive time-capsule quality to "Hawkes Harbor." There are pirates, an insane asylum, a shark attack, soft-core sex with a mean rich girl on a yacht, soft-core sex with two nubile young women on a cruise ship, a haunted house, a ghost and . . . a vampire. The vampire angle is tossed into the novel nearly halfway through. Her vampire, Grenville Hawkes, is the least convincing member of the undead since Ed Woods's chiropractor put on poor dead Bela Lugosi's cape in "Plan 9 From Outer Space."

On her Web site, Hinton states that "I have to become my narrator when I'm writing." The reader can only assume that in order to write an "adult" novel, she felt it necessary to abandon her great strength- the first-person voice that gave us some of the most influential Young Adult books ever written. A novel about the grownup Ponyboy or Tex could have been brilliant- so could a book featuring an entirely new cast of kids adrift in a new century. Sadly, that's not the novel Hinton has written.