The storyline is one of the oldest in literature — the arrival of the stranger who insinuates himself into a small, closed community. The tale is in two unequal halves, Book One set in “April 1950” and Book Two, with 51 of the novel’s 63 chapters, a generation later in June 1968. The two dates bookend the legislative career of Frank Finklea, D-Bluff, in the South Carolina General Assembly. No prizes for guessing who was the inspiration for his mentor, the all-powerful and fabulously manipulative Speaker of the House Simon Solomon.

In 1950, when Frank Finklea entered the legislature, segregation was still firmly entrenched in every aspect of South Carolina life; by the summer of 1968 the oncemighty fortress of white supremacy was beginning to crumble, even in remote Bluff County, but there was still little contact between the races. Chapter 19, an account of a black funeral, in which Minah Mae bids farewell to her only son, a promising football player who has been mysteriously gunned down, is perhaps the most vivid and fully-realized in the novel. Mrs. Lincoln shared a deep bond with her son. The politician’s only son, Thomas Adger Finklea, learned early to detest his progenitor: “As the years went by, Tom Finklea wanted to be nothing like the fat, balding arrogant excuse for a father he’d grown to hate.” In this tale of white and black folk in uneasy proximity, the blackest character of all is Frank Finklea, who is curtly pronounced “evil.” There are no nuances in Ken Burger’s vision of South Carolina politics. Of the senior Finklea he writes, “He and his fellow legislative bandits believed they ran the world and everybody loved living in it.”

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, for this is, after all, a “thriller,” but after Representative Finklea adjourns to the General Assembly in the sky he has to be replaced as chief villain, and the abrupt insinuation of Chet Sloan in Chapter 51 is the novel’s least convincing twist of plot. “Handpicked and highly paid through one of Simon Solomon’s slush funds, Sloan was a mercenary, a bona fide secret weapon.” Unfortunately, he is also a bona fide cardboard character — have bazooka, will travel.

“The real world is full of stereotypes — I can’t walk to the post office without encountering a few — but the population of stereotypes in Swallow Savannah is truly alarming — the linthead’s beauteous daughter, the priapic legislator, the gay football coach. Martha Adger Finklea, source of her horrible husband’s money and social position, is also a stereotype — the inbred Southern heiress — but she is the most sympathetic character in the large cast, zombie though she be: “She hardly seemed engaged in life itself.” It is possible to become involved in her pain, as it is not in her husband’s trials and machinations.

Their only child has by the time he enters the University of South Carolina become dependent on the kindness of Jack Daniels. In the proud tradition of Southern bluebloods, he is sent to the gruesome Butler Island to be dried out, but then after an interlude back in Columbia suddenly finds himself running the family newspaper, the Groton Gazette. Ken Burger is one of the best-known and most award-laden journalists in South Carolina, so it understandable that he should pay some attention to his profession in his first novel. In this world in which anything can be arranged by a single phone call, young Tom is given a job at Columbia’s main newspaper, the Sentinel, under its crusty old editor Tug McAllister. The scenes from newspaper life are among the most amusing and convincing in the novel.

I kept wanting to give this novelist the advice I always long to stage-whisper from the choir stalls when the children of the parish do the Sunday readings: “Slow down!” The action moves at a furious pace; most of the chapters are shorter than the average columnist’s allotted inches. Towards the end I sense that Ken Burger, like some far more experienced novelists such as Ron Rash, is thinking ahead to the movie version, so much so that the narrative becomes a sort of script. It is rare to find a novel with no sex — unless one counts the football coach’s remarkably unsubtle come-on to Tom Finklea — but there is plenty of violence to make up for the lack of bedroom action.

This is undeniably a good read, and many readers will find the yarn Ken Burger spins compelling. I find a strange paucity of inner life in the characters; there is far too little “show” to balance the crowded plot’s “tell.” (Young Ken seems to have read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn once too often — the climactic scene takes place on a raft in the Savannah River.) Ken Burger will perhaps forgive me for comparing the experience of reading Swallow Savannah to that of eating a patty melt. I’d never heard of such a thing, and had to ask what one is, but was eventually persuaded to try this item. It wasn’t bad, but I missed the top bun. I think Ken Burger has it in him to serve up a succulent cheeseburger of a novel, with both buns framing a delectable interior, and I hope he will favor us with another tale set in his childhood home where, as no less an authority than Pat Conroy reminds us on the back cover, he is the first South Carolina novelist to explore.