Fairhope’s Roy Hoffman, with two volumes of essays and now four novels, has become one of Alabama’s finest storytellers.

In these novels, he has carved out a sort of niche for himself, noting that there is more ethnic diversity in Alabama than just black and white, and the strained or stressful relationships between these two groups.

In her first novel, “Almost Family” (1983), Hoffman began her exploration of this territory, with the story of a Jewish wife and mother, Vivian Gold, and an African-American Nebraska cook and housekeeper. Waters.

Then, in 2004, he released “Chicken Dreaming Corn”, making more use of his own unusual family history. His grandfather had come to America from Romania.

In 2014 we had “Come Landfall” in which some of the characters are Vietnamese boat people who escaped from Southeast Asia and are now fishing shrimp and practicing Buddhism on our Gulf Coast.

“The Pelican’s Promise” continues this exploration. The protagonist, 82-year-old Hank Weinberg, is a recently widowed and reluctantly retired defense attorney living in Fairhope, spending a lot of time on the pier with the other old folks, though he’s far from a good typical old boy from Alabama.

A 5-year-old Holocaust survivor from Amsterdam, Hank was smuggled to England and then to the United States, but his entire family was lost to the death camps. Hank thinks about this childhood tragedy every day, in a sense, never recovering from the loss, suffering from lifelong post-traumatic stress disorder.

But he will have something to occupy his mind.

Hank and his Honduran assistant Lupita, who fled vicious gangs in her homeland, care for Roger, his 4-year-old grandson with special needs.

Roger’s mother, Hank’s daughter Vanessa, is divorced and an alcoholic in rehab. She’s going to need more than 12 steps.

It’s a cliché among novelists that a metaphorically most satisfying way to do this is to have your character climb up a tree and throw rocks at it, making everything worse and worse.

Hoffman really does that.

Lupita’s brother, Julio, a good guy, golf course and Point Clear hotel worker, comes across a recently stabbed man. He obtains incriminating evidence – blood – on himself, then foolishly flees.

His daughter Vanessa, who is a lawyer herself and should know better, runs away, as they say, from rehab, flees town, gets drunk, goes to Mexico. His behavior makes the sane reader scream in agony, “Don’t do that.” You are so stupid! You’re making everything worse!”

She can’t hear you, of course.

Hank must come out of retirement to defend Julio. Although there is, in “Pelican”, a murder and a mystery, the emphasis is on the defense, not on the search for the killer.

We learn again that the public does not like defense attorneys. Some think they’re helping bad guys escape punishment, and clients, usually perfectly guilty, are angry that their lawyer couldn’t get them out or get them a lighter sentence.

In this case, Weinberg also directly experiences xenophobia against Hispanics. Unfortunately, he thinks one of his fellow University of Alabama Law School graduates, now U.S. Attorney General, “ignited” that fear.

Hoffman, whose 97-year-old father was Alabama’s oldest practicing attorney, can’t help but offer some clever points to Hank for those with ears.

Of lawyers having to bring in jury consultants, like TV’s “Bull,” Hank says lawyers used to do it themselves and “the profession had slipped from the high standards of his beginnings”.

The lawyers’ faces beaming from the billboards make him feel like “his honorable appeal has been diminished by manipulative marketing.”

The title? As in all of Hoffman’s novels, the focus is on family, and legend tells us that the pelican, a devoted parent, “will pierce its own breast for blood to feed the hungry chicks.”

Don Noble’s latest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson and eleven other Alabama authors.

“The Pelican’s Promise: A Novel”

Author: Roy Hoffman

Publisher: Arcade Publishers

new York

Pages: 288

Price: $26.99 (hardcover)