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"  If a story is about a bear, I say, bring on the damn bear. Dostoevsky knows what I&amp;#039;m talking about. In his Crime and Punishment, a St. Petersburg student named Raskolnikov formulates and carries out a plan to kill a pawnbroker, hacking her up with an ax -- a climactic moment that occurs not in the overture of the sprawling novel, but in its first few chapters. In this way Crime and Punishment is an after story, concerned with event, yes, but more so its consequences.  Larry Watson&amp;#039;s seventh book, Sundown, Yellow Moon (Random House; $25.95; 308 pages), brings on the damn bear in an after novel worthy of Dostoevsky. In it, a handgun trades places with an ax, and Russia with North Dakota, where on an icy afternoon in January, 1961, a man named Raymond Stoddard walks into the state capital, shoots and kills a charismatic state senator, calmly drives home, knots a noose around the crossbeam of his garage&amp;#039;s rafters, and hangs himself. Here the novel begins -- with an end. &amp;quot;In spite of the popularity of mystery novels, is who the question we really want answered? Isn&amp;#039;t why what we truly want to know?&amp;quot; This is the hook Watson hangs the narrative from: why? A man in deepest winter comes to a life-altering decision, the thoughts in his mind crystallizing and taking form like breath in frigid air, something a hand can reach for but not grasp.  Our narrator -- once a neighbor to Stoddard, now a novelist haunted by him -- pursues this question for more than forty years. The day remains trapped in his consciousness like a wasp in amber, a barbed thing he enjoys studying, holding up to the light with wonder. And so he writes stories that are all, he comes to realize, &amp;quot;part of a single story that has shifted and swelled over time but never strayed for from [his] core,&amp;quot; a story that begins with sirens howling in the streets of Bismarck.  Bob Dylan sang, &amp;quot;Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past/I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast,&amp;quot; and so goes the novel, cycling through history, trying to turn up new clues and make sense of the human heart, its dark recesses finally illuminated by Watson carrying a lamp lit with blood. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/reviews/a3984/sundown-yellow-moon-review/>