Don’t try to fool me, because I know what you’re doing. You’re grieving the end of the playoffs and counting the days until hockey starts up again. In the meantime, there’s the NHL awards, the draft, free agency and the usual flurry of signings, rookie camps, and training camp.

But you’re the only one in your house who cares about all that, right? The other members of your family, having put up with you hogging the TV for two months, are looking forward to a summer vacation, two glorious weeks of driving around towing a camper or sitting on a beach, frying, and reading a paperback.

Let me tell you how to put one over on them and keep your hockey longing in check until the fall. Grab a copy of Jack Falla’s book "Saved" (St. Martin’s, 2007) before you head out for your trip, and while everyone else is reading John Grisham, enjoy the story of fictional NHL goalie Jean Pierre Savard.

Saved is a tour de force for more reasons than just that it’s a gripping read. As the product of an artist, it builds on the familiar voice of Falla’s Home Ice but goes beyond it, technically, by creating a narrator who works wonders with words. This is a hard switch to pull off, but in writing Saved, Falla has risen above his role as the dean of U.S. hockey writers. He’s turned himself into a first class novelist.

Technical matters aside, Falla’s is a storybook of considerable interest, and I doubt many of you, once you start reading about the exploits of the fictional Bruins goalie, will be able to put the book down. Savard tells you early in the book, “It’s harder to be a good good-team goalie than a good bad-team goalie. A good bad-team goalie knows he’s going to get a lot of shots - a lot of chances to be a star - and his team isn’t expected to win, so there’s less pressure.” He’s setting you up for the tale of the season to come, and by this point, nearly 50 pages in, you’re with him all the way and dying for him to push the plot along.

As the story goes, you get what we all wish we got from our real-life playing heroes - details about his personal life, his struggles, his losses, and his loyalties to his friends and his great love, who died young of cancer. You watch as he falls in love again, deals with a modern two-career partnership, and worries as his team first falters, then looks like it will make a run. All the while, in true goaltender fashion, he mulls his future, never quite at ease at what will be as time unfolds.

Were I to tell you more at this point, I’d ruin what is a wonderful plot, so let me just say the narrative in Saved is compelling. Throughout, Falla has command of the character, painting him in his complexities both as a player and as a person. And as the book winds up, you’ll be simultaneously rushing toward the end, desperate to find out Savard’s fate and looking at the dwindling number of pages and going “Darn, why can’t this be twice as long?”

If you’re on the beach when you finish, you’ll come back to the moment with a start, surprised that the world you’ve been living in through the novel’s pages remains confined between these covers. But you’ll also take comfort in the fact that with every passing sunset, the new hockey season comes closer. And having read Falla’s book, watching hockey next year will be different, because you’ll be hard pressed not to reflect back on what Saved taught you about the men who play the game.

Brian Kennedy’s book Growing Up Hockey tells the life story of everyone who ever loved the game. Check out www.growinguphockey.com for more information or to share your stories.