Father-daughter tale full of suspense

Not long ago, I found myself in a fancy Washington restaurant debating a noted Irish novelist about the importance of plot.

Plot, the writer said, is wildly overrated and far less significant than language. I insisted that plot is what keeps people reading. He was polite but clearly disappointed by my juvenile taste.

If only I’d had a copy of Hannah Tinti’s terrific new novel, “The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley.” The book re-engineers the ancient myth of Hercules into a modern-day wonder.

Tinti, the editor and co-founder of One Story magazine, knows how to cast the old campfire spell to keep people desperately wanting to know what happens. (The novel already has been optioned for television.)

The story unfolds in Olympus — not the realm of Zeus and his family but Olympus, Massachusetts.

Widower Samuel Hawley ■ “The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley” (Dial, 376 pages, $27) by Hannah Tinti has moved into the small fishing town with his 12-year-old daughter, Loo. He’s ruggedly handsome but gruff enough to keep people at a distance — a conflicted and compromised hero whose lineage stretches all the way from the Old West to the old gods.

Loo, meanwhile, is a precocious girl who “had grown strange” — “the way children will when set apart,” Tinti writes.

Although Olympus is where Loo’s late mother once lived, the townspeople regard their new neighbors with suspicion. Loo is teased at school until she beats a few of her tormentors.

On one level, the novel tells the tender story of a girl trying to carve out an identity for herself while maturing in the shade of her father’s endless grief.

As loving as he is, Hawley has something coiled and secretive about him that colors his daughter’s sense of the world. (His massive collection of guns suggests that he’s always bracing for something ghastly.)

In each of the many homes where Hawley and Loo have lived, Hawley immortalizes his late wife with a makeshift shrine of photos and knickknacks in a bathroom. As much as Loo idealizes her father, she remains in a constant state of thirst for scraps of information about her mother.

Tinti’s writing is lovely and rich but hardly electrifying. The novel’s explosive momentum results as Tinti repeatedly leads us to the surface of Hawley’s body. There, etched in scar tissue, are the tales of 12 bullets.

Every other chapter takes us back to a near-deadly adventure in Hawley’s criminal past that started with robbing gas stations and ended with fencing priceless antiques.

The breathless race of missteps, disasters and murder stretches for years.

“Bullets,” Hawley says through gritted teeth, “usually go right through me.”

“Twelve Lives” is a master class in literary suspense. Each one of the 12 stories drops us into a fresh setting somewhere in the country, establishes a tense situation in progress, then barrels along until slugs start tearing into flesh.

As the novel alternates between Hawley’s violent past and his tranquil (if lonely) present, readers come to understand the life that keeps him so anxious about his daughter’s safety.

“The past never leaves you,” Hawley tells Loo. “It’s like a shadow, always trying to catch up.”

That’s a mystery that Loo solves along with readers until her father’s history and her life inevitably converge.