This is like the unwritten postscript to a book I just read by Ron Powers, called "Tom and Huck don't live here anymore." Powers, who wrote the evenhanded memoir "White town drowsing" revisited his hometown as a result of friends telling him that the place had "changed," and more specifically in response to two senseless murders by teenagers in the late 1990's. In the first, a jogger is the vicim of a "joke" as a pair of teenaged boys drive past him and open the car door - leaving the victim with mortal head wounds. In the second, weeks later, a teenaged boy kills the relative of his girlfriend with a shotgun. The detail given to the two murders makes the book read more like Hannibal Lecter than Mark Twain's earthly paradise. Powers makes a sullen tour of the town, searching down ineffectual and distant parents who think they can solve all of their kids' problems by moving into multi-acre estates west of town, a day care center fighting a losing battle with overcrowding and underfunding, and the parents of the killers. Powers finds a Pap Finn everywhere he looks - in a case of painful honesty, he also describes punishments given him by his own abusive father. Is Powers describing Hannibal or all of America in the late 1990's? He keeps that question open. This book is as dark as some of Twain's later writing, but I couldn't put it down. Terry Terry Ballard Quinnipiac University