"THE RESERVOIR" might remind you of "An American Tragedy."

As in Theodore Dreiser's classic, the protagonist is a young man whose ambition and appetites have delivered him to the yawning brink of disaster.

There is a young pregnant woman who wants our not-so-heroic hero, Tommie Cluverius, to marry her, something he desperately does not want to do.

There is water, in this case a city reservoir with a dead, pregnant body floating in it.

And there is a trial (always a great vehicle for drama), in which relentless prosecutors render Tommie's plight more and more hopeless.

"The Reservoir" is set in Richmond in 1885, as the former capital of the Confederacy begins to rebound from the Late Unpleasantness and Reconstruction.

The author, John Milliken Thompson, does an outstanding job of capturing the city at that time. He obviously was thorough in researching the real-life case from which his first novel is crafted.

He seems to hit all the right notes with his descriptions of the people and city of that time.

Tommie Cluverius, a young lawyer from the country, yearns to lift himself up in the world. He becomes engaged to a well-bred young woman who he knows is the kind of wife he will need to reach the heights to which he aspires.

But he becomes besotted with his cousin, Lillie, who also has formed an entanglement with his brother. He might have slipped away, but then she becomes pregnant and tells him he's the father. It's 1885. His options are somewhat limited.

The book opens with Lillie's corpse at center stage, floating in the city's reservoir, and Tommie Cluverius' life starts an inexorable downward spiral that is fascinating to watch.

The only quibble I had with this tale is that I expected that somehow something was going to happen, late in the book, that would knock my socks off and make me say, "Wow. I didn't see that coming."

There is a surprise, but it isn't a major one. It isn't something you couldn't have expected, and it doesn't have much impact.

Still, this book will entertain readers with the quality of its writing, its true and intricate details of 1885 Richmond and its tale of a lower-case 't' American tragedy.

Howard Owen is business editor of The Free Lance-Star and author of nine novels.