‘Summerlong,’ by Dean Bakopoulos

(He’s the author of the exquisite “Please Don’t Come Back From the Moon,” about sons experiencing their fathers’ mysterious disappearance from their 1990 Detroit neighborhoods.) But now in “Summerlong,” he drops us smack into present times, and the town of Grinnell, Iowa, during a single summer heat wave of lust, longing and the vagaries of love.

Don’s the father of two kids who, in the novel’s single flaw, act more as grace notes than fully formed story participants.

Adrift, unable to write, she takes a welcome detour when she meets Charlie Gulliver, a young failed actor who has come to Grinnell to tend to his father’s dementia and find the manuscript his father supposedly wrote.

Into the mix comes Amelia Benitez-Coors, known as ABC, heartbroken over the death of her lover, Philly, and determined to reunite with Philly by plotting her own demise.

Ruth encourages ABC to get to know Don, sure that he can lead her to Philly in some mystical way, but the truth, of course, turns out to be much more fascinating.

Bakopoulos’ sense of place is just as astute as his attention to people, so precise you swear you can hear the bugs whining in the high Iowa corn and feel the sweat dripping from your own neck.

The dusk is “hay gold” and there is a “wild, spilling sunset,” the people are a blend of “meth heads and farmers and blown-apart high school football failures all drinking together, an invented family held together by bad decisions and muted rage.”

[...] Don can’t give up hope and persuades the whole crew to troop off to the family’s annual family vacation in northern Minnesota, which turns out to have many more dangers, secrets and surprises than just the bear Don encounters.

All the threads Bakopoulos has been expertly weaving suddenly begin to connect, and suddenly everything fits in a way that is as dazzling as the firefires that dot the shore, bringing a sense of absolute wonder and even a kind of hope.