Download or read book Hell at the Breech written by Tom Franklin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1897, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered in the rural area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat. His outraged friends -- —mostly poor cotton farmers -- form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe responsible. The hooded members wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty. Caught in the maelstrom of the Mitcham war are four people: the aging sheriff sympathetic to both sides; the widowed midwife who delivered nearly every member of Hell-at-the-Breech; a ruthless detective who wages his own war against the gang; and a young store clerk who harbors a terrible secret. Based on incidents that occurred a few miles from the author's childhood home, Hell at the Breech chronicles the events of dark days that led the people involved to discover their capacity for good, evil, or for both.

Download or read book Hell at the Breech written by Tom Franklin and published by William Morrow. This book was released on 2003-05-27 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1897, in the rural southwestern area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered. Seeking retribution, his outraged friends -- mostly poor cotton farmers -- form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe are responsible. The hooded members of this gang wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre, where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty. Caught in the maelstrom of the Mitcham War are four people: the county's aging sheriff, sympathetic to both sides; the widowed midwife who delivered nearly every member of Hell-at-the-Breech; a ruthless detective who wages his own private war against the gang; and a young store clerk harboring a terrible secret. Based on incidents that occurred a few miles from the author's childhood home, Hell at the Breech chronicles the dark events of dark days, events that lead the people involved to discover their capacity for good, for evil, or for both. It is a mesmerizing and unforgettable display of talent by a writer of immeasurable gifts.

Download or read book Hell at the Breech 20pk RGG written by Tom Franklin and published by Avon. This book was released on 2004-01-20 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Crooked Letter Crooked Letter written by Tom Franklin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The classic trifecta of talent, heart, and a bone-deep sense of storytelling….A masterful performance, deftly rendered and deeply satisfying. For days on end, I woke with this story on my mind.” —David Wroblewski A powerful and resonant novel from the critically acclaimed author of Smonk and Hell at the Breech, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter tells the riveting story of two boyhood friends, torn apart by circumstance, who are brought together again by a terrible crime in a small Mississippi town. An extraordinary novel that seamlessly blends elements of crime and Southern literary fiction, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is a must for readers of Larry Brown, Pete Dexter, Ron Rash, and Dennis Lehane. In the late 1970s, Larry Ott and Silas "32" Jones were boyhood pals. Their worlds were as different as night and day: Larry, the child of lower-middle-class white parents, and Silas, the son of a poor, single black mother. Yet for a few months the boys stepped outside of their circumstances and shared a special bond. But then tragedy struck: Larry took a girl on a date to a drive-in movie, and she was never heard from again. She was never found and Larry never confessed, but all eyes rested on him as the culprit. The incident shook the county—and perhaps Silas most of all. His friendship with Larry was broken, and then Silas left town. More than twenty years have passed. Larry, a mechanic, lives a solitary existence, never able to rise above the whispers of suspicion. Silas has returned as a constable. He and Larry have no reason to cross paths until another girl disappears and Larry is blamed again. And now the two men who once called each other friend are forced to confront the past they've buried and ignored for decades.

Download or read book Smonk written by Tom Franklin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Fast-paced and unrelentingly violent . . . readers looking for a strange and savage tale can’t go wrong” with this western from an Edgar Award–winning author (Publishers Weekly). From the New York Times–bestselling author of Hell at the Breech and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, a historical thriller in turns hilarious, bawdy and terrifying. It’s 1911 and the townsfolk of Old Texas, Alabama, have had enough. Every Saturday night for a year, E. O. Smonk has been destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men, all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over-and-under rifle. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty, and goitered—an expert with explosives and knives—Smonk hates horses, goats, and the Irish, and it’s high time he was stopped. But capturing old Smonk won’t be easy—and putting him on trial could have shocking and disastrous consequences, considering the terrible secret the citizens of Old Texas are hiding. Praise for Tom Franklin: “I’m reminded, by the evocative strength of the prose and the relentlessness of the imagination, of William Faulkner.” —Philip Roth “It’s as if the author kidnapped Raymond Carver’s characters and set them loose in the Deep South.” —The New York Times Book Review

Download or read book The Tilted World written by Tom Franklin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set against the backdrop of the historic flooding of the Mississippi River, The Tilted World is an extraordinary tale of murder and moonshine, sandbagging and saboteurs, and a man and a woman who find unexpected love, from Tom Franklin, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, and award-winning poet Beth Ann Fennelly The year is 1927. As rains swell the Mississippi, the mighty river threatens to burst its banks and engulf everything in its path, including federal revenue agent Ted Ingersoll and his partner, Ham Johnson. Arriving in the tiny hamlet of Hobnob, Mississippi, to investigate the disappearance of two fellow agents who'd been on the trail of a local bootlegger, they are astonished to find a baby boy abandoned in the middle of a crime scene. Ingersoll, an orphan raised by nuns, is determined to find the infant a home, and his search leads him to Dixie Clay Holliver. A strong woman married too young to a philandering charmer, Dixie Clay has lost a child to illness and is powerless to resist this second chance at motherhood. From the moment they meet, Ingersoll and Dixie Clay are drawn to each other. He has no idea that she's the best bootlegger in the county and may be connected to the agents' disappearance. And while he seems kind and gentle, Dixie Clay knows full well that he is an enemy who can never be trusted. When Ingersoll learns that a saboteur might be among them, planning a catastrophe along the river that would wreak havoc in Hobnob, he knows that he and Dixie Clay will face challenges and choices that they will be fortunate to survive. Written with extraordinary insight and tenderness, The Tilted World is that rarest of creations, a story of seemingly ordinary people who find hope and deliverance where they least expect it—in each other.

Download or read book Poachers written by Tom Franklin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Edgar Award winner, Tom Franklin’s Poachers collects ten stunning, bleak tales set in the woodlands, swamps and chemical plants along the Alabama River. Staking his claim as a fresh, original Southern voice, Tom Frankin’s lyric, deceptively simple prose conjures a world where the default setting is violence, a world of hunting and fishing, gambling and losing, drinking and poaching—a world most of us have never seen. In the chilling title novella, three wild boys confront a mythic game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river they haunt. And, as a weathered, hand-painted sign reads: “Jesus is not coming.” This terrain isn’t pretty, isn’t for the weak of heart, but in these deperate, lost people, Franklin somehow finds the moments of grace that make them what they so abundantly are: human. “While he may occasionally wax sentimental about life in the impoverished South, Franklin’s style is often as laconic and simply spoken as his characters’ dialogue, sometimes close to Hemingway, but more often akin to Denis Johnson or Raymond Carver in its resonant ordinariness.” —Publishers Weekly

Download or read book Hell s Foundations Quiver written by David Weber and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Centuries after survivors of the first human-alien war start over in an unindustrialized region under religious rule, a cybernetic avatar reawakens to restart humanity's progress and claim its place in the universe.

Download or read book A Glimpse of Hell written by Charles C. Thompson and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 1999 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Probes the explosion of the center gun on the USS Iowa, a disaster that killed several sailors onboard instantly, and the fouled investigation that took followed, resulting in a large-scale cover-up that almost ruined forever the reputation of innocent men.

Download or read book Breach written by W.L. Goodwater and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first novel in a new Cold War fantasy series, where the Berlin Wall is made entirely of magic. When a breach unexpectedly appears in the wall, spies from both sides swarm to the city as World War III threatens to spark. AFTER THE WAR, THE WALL BROUGHT AN UNEASY PEACE. When Soviet magicians conjured an arcane wall to blockade occupied Berlin, the world was outraged but let it stand for the sake of peace. Now, after ten years of fighting with spies instead of spells, the CIA has discovered the unthinkable... THE WALL IS FAILING. While refugees and soldiers mass along the border, operatives from East and West converge on the most dangerous city in the world to either stop the crisis, or take advantage of it. Karen, a young magician with the American Office of Magical Research and Deployment, is sent to investigate the breach in the Wall and determine if it can be fixed. Instead, she discovers that the truth is elusive in this divided city--and that even magic itself has its own agenda. THE TRUTH OF THE WALL IS ABOUT TO BE REVEALED.

Download or read book The House at the End of the Road written by W. Ralph Eubanks and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-05-13 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful story about race and identity told through the lives of one American family across three generations In 1914, in defiance of his middle-class landowning family, a young white man named James Morgan Richardson married a light-skinned black woman named Edna Howell. Over more than twenty years of marriage, they formed a strong family and built a house at the end of a winding sandy road in South Alabama, a place where their safety from the hostile world around them was assured, and where they developed a unique racial and cultural identity. Jim and Edna Richardson were Ralph Eubanks's grandparents. Part personal journey, part cultural biography, The House at the End of the Road examines a little-known piece of this country's past: interracial families that survived and prevailed despite Jim Crow laws, including those prohibiting mixed-race marriage. As he did in his acclaimed 2003 memoir, Ever Is a Long Time, Eubanks uses interviews, oral history, and archival research to tell a story about race in American life that few readers have experienced. Using the Richardson family as a microcosm of American views on race and identity, The House at the End of the Road examines why ideas about racial identity rooted in the eighteenth century persist today. In lyrical, evocative prose, this extraordinary book pierces the heart of issues of race and racial identity, leaving us ultimately hopeful about the world as our children might see it.

Download or read book Southern Bound written by John S. Sledge and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2013-03-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Southern Bound represents a running conversation on books, writers, and literary travel written for the Mobile Press-Register Books page from 1995 to 2011 by John S. Sledge. The collection includes more than one hundred of the best pieces culled from Sledge's total output of approximately seven hundred columns. Numerous classic authors are celebrated in these pages, including Homer, Plato, Gibbon, Melville, Proust, Conrad, Cather, and Steinbeck as well as modern writers such as Walter Edgar, Tom Franklin, and Eugene Walter. While some of the essays are relatively straightforward book reviews, others present meditative and deeply personal perspectives on the author's literary experiences such as serving on the jury in the play version To Kill a Mockingbird; spending the night alone in a Jesuit college library's venerable stacks; rambling through funky New Orleans bookshops; talking to Square Books owner Richard Howorth while overlooking the Oxford, Mississippi courthouse; rereading Treasure Island on the shores of Mobile Bay; and remembering a beloved father's favorite books. Engaging and spirited, Southern Bound represents the critical art at its most accessible and will prove entertaining fare for anyone who loves the written word.

Download or read book The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 written by Elizabeth George and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anthony Award–winning author presents a “highly readable” anthology featuring mysteries by Stephen King, Megan Abbott, Elmore Leonard and more (Publishers Weekly). “What you’ll find in this volume are stories that demonstrate a mastery of plotting; stories that compel you to keep turning the pages because of plot and because of setting; stories that wield suspense like a sword; stories of people getting their comeuppance; stories that utilize superb point of view; stories that plumb one particular and unfortunate attribute of a character,” promises guest editor Elizabeth George in her introduction. The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 is a feast of both literary crime and hard-boiled detection, featuring a seemingly innocent murderer, a drug dealer in love, a drunken prank gone terribly wrong, and plenty of other surprising twists and turns. The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 includes entries by Steve Almond, Megan Abbott, Matt Bell, Lydia Fitzpatrick, Tom Franklin, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and others. “There isn’t enough Xanax in anyone’s medicine cabinet to calm the jitters these 20 skillful stories will unleash on a worried world.” —Kirkus Reviews

Download or read book The Essential Mystery Lists written by Roger M Sobin and published by Poisoned Pen Press Inc. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in one place, Roger M. Sobin has compiled a list of nominees and award winners of virtually every mystery award ever presented. He has also included many of the “best of” lists by more than fifty of the most important contributors to the genre.; Mr. Sobin spent more than two decades gathering the data and lists in this volume, much of that time he used to recheck the accuracy of the material he had collected. Several of the “best of” lists appear here for the first time in book form. Several others have been unavailable for a number of years.; Of special note, are Anthony Boucher’s “Best Picks for the Year.” Boucher, one of the major mystery reviewers of all time, reviewed for The San Francisco Chronicle, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and The New York Times. From these resources Mr. Sobin created “Boucher’s Best” and “Important Lists to Consider,” lists that provide insight into important writing in the field from 1942 through Boucher’s death in 1968.? This is a great resource for all mystery readers and collectors.; ; Winner of the 2008 Macavity Awards for Best Mystery Nonfiction.

Download or read book The Breach written by Patrick Lee and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-12-29 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Audacious and terrifying—and uncannily believable.” —Lee Child New York Times bestselling author of the Jack Reacher series, Lee Child, was blown away by The Breach—and you will be, too! A novel of unrelenting suspense and nonstop surprises, The Breach immediately rockets author Patrick Lee into the V.I.P. section of the thriller universe. A treat for Jack Bauer (“24”) fans and “X-Files” aficionados, it is a white-knuckle roller-coaster ride that combines the best of Dean Koontz and Michael Crichton with a healthy dollop of Indiana Jones thrown into the mix—the perfect secret agent/government conspiracy/supernatural adventure.

Download or read book Smonk LP written by Tom Franklin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2007-02-20 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's 1911 and the secluded southwestern Alabama town of Old Texas has been besieged by a scabrous and malevolent character called E. O. Smonk. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty and goitered, Smonk is also an expert with explosives and knives. He abhors horses, goats and the Irish. Every Saturday night for a year he's been riding his mule into Old Texas, destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men—all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over and under rifle. At last the desperate citizens of the town, themselves harboring a terrible secret, put Smonk on trial, with disastrous and shocking results. Thus begins the highly anticipated new novel from Tom Franklin, acclaimed author of Hell at the Breech and Poachers. Smonk is also the story of Evavangeline, a fifteen-year-old prostitute quick to pull a trigger or cork. A case of mistaken identity plunges her into the wild sugarcane country between the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers, land suffering from the worst drought in a hundred years and plagued by rabies. Pursued by a posse of unlikely vigilantes, Evavangeline boats upriver and then wends through the dust and ruined crops, forced along the way to confront her own clouded past. She eventually stumbles upon Old Texas, where she is fated to E. O. Smonk and the townspeople in a way she could never imagine. In turns hilarious, violent, bawdy and terrifying, Smonk creates its own category: It's a southern, not a western, peopled with corrupt judges and assassins, a cuckolded blacksmith, Christian deputies, widows, War veterans, whores, witches, madmen and zombies. By the time the smoke has cleared, the mystery of Smonk will be revealed, the survivors changed forever.

Download or read book Rough South Rural South written by Jean W. Cash and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays in Rough South, Rural South describe and discuss the work of southern writers who began their careers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They fall into two categories. Some, born into the working class, strove to become writers and learned without benefit of higher education, such writers as Larry Brown and William Gay. Others came from lower- or middle-class backgrounds and became writers through practice and education: Dorothy Allison, Tom Franklin, Tim Gautreaux, Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Silas House, Jill McCorkle, Chris Offutt, Ron Rash, Lee Smith, Brad Watson, Daniel Woodrell, and Steve Yarbrough. Their twenty-first-century colleagues are Wiley Cash, Peter Farris, Skip Horack, Michael Farris Smith, Barb Johnson, and Jesmyn Ward. In his seminal article, Erik Bledsoe distinguishes Rough South writers from such writers as William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. Younger writers who followed Harry Crews were born into and write about the Rough South. These writers undercut stereotypes, forcing readers to see the working poor differently. The next pieces begin with those on Crews and Cormac McCarthy, major influences on an entire generation. Later essays address members of both groups—the self-educated and the college-educated. Both groups share a clear understanding of the value of working-class southerners. Nearly all of the writers hold a reverence for the South's landscape and its inhabitants as well as an affinity for realistic depictions of setting and characters.