Review by New York Times Review
THE CAREER CRIMINALS in genre novels don't have money problems. If they need some, they just go out and steal it. But such financial transactions can backfire, which is what happened back in 2004 when the Texas gang in Michael Robotham's LIFE OR DEATH (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) robbed $7 million from an armored truck. That ill-fated enterprise ended with four people dead. One robber was shot and captured alive, but the surviving gang member was never seen again and the money was never recovered. Audie Palmer survived the bullets that led to his capture, but he's had to fight for his life every day of the 10 years he's spent in prison. According to the inmate who befriended him, Moss Webster (a convicted killer but a prince of a guy), "that boy was stabbed, strangled, beaten, glassed and burned" by guards and inmates alike, thinking they could force him to reveal what became of the money and his brother, Carl, who presumably fled with it. These attacks intensify as Audie's release date nears, but on the morning of his discharge he's nowhere to be found. "What sort of idiot escapes the day before his release?" wonders Special Agent Desiree Furness of the F.B.I., who's smarter than most of the other characters looking for Audie. But not as shrewd as the shady individuals who arrange a furlough for Moss and the promise of freedom if he finds his friend before the rest of the mob. Although Audie is entirely too composed for someone looking into the teeth of this wolf pack, he's a man with hidden depths and horrific secrets. Moss is your real boon companion on this manhunt. A big bruiser, he may not be as subtle a thinker as Agent Furness or as complicated a character as Audie, but he's emotionally involved in Audie's fate and morally conflicted about his own role in determining it. Besides, his warm voice, thick with country honey, is the one you want to hear. Robotham, who's from Australia, isn't entirely at ease with the Texas vernacular, but he's responsive enough to the idiosyncrasies of the culture that he can thrill to a piece of American Gothic like this sign on a church in Houston: "If you really love God, show Him your money." ARIANA FRANKLIN died before she could finish the siege winter (Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99). But her daughter, Samantha Norman, picked up the narrative and has delivered a rousing but unsparingly harsh account of medieval life as experienced by ordinary people. England is engulfed in civil war in A.D. 1141 when the fighting reaches the small fenland village from which 11-year-old Emma is kidnapped, savagely abused and left for dead by a vile monk traveling with marauding mercenaries on their way to sack Ely Cathedral. A kinder, more principled mercenary named Gwilherm de Vannes saves the girl's life and helps her disguise herself as his apprentice - no more a weak girl but a brave boy named Penda. In a parallel narrative featuring another resourceful female, 16-year-old Maud of Kenniford takes over the management of her ancestral castle and becomes a political force in negotiations with the warring monarchs, King Stephen and Empress Matilda. "I am the chatelaine," she asserts, in swearing allegiance to the empress, who takes refuge at Kenniford, triggering the siege that becomes the heart of the book. The intricate narrative design of the novel works a murderous subplot involving that fiendish monk into a broader view of how feudal law broke down under the anarchy of civil war. Those thrilling battles do look different when seen by women like Maud, Emma and the empress. IN THE MOUNTAINS of North Carolina, the setting of David Joy's remarkable first novel, WHERE ALL LIGHT TENDS TO GO (Putnam, $26.95), "outlawing was just as much a matter of blood as hair color and height." Jacob McNeely, the 18-year-old son of the regional drug lord, has no illusions about who he is or where he came from. ("Mama snorted crystal, Daddy sold it to her.") But his love for the smartest girl in town makes him think he might yet determine who he becomes. No such luck, as long as Daddy needs him to help move product, launder money or dump bodies in the reservoir. That last incident entirely upsets Jacob's equilibrium, dragging him deeper into his father's affairs and further away from the future he wants for himself. This isn't your ordinary coming-of-age novel, but with his bone-cutting insights into these men and the region that bred them, Joy makes it an extraordinarily intimate experience. MAISIE DOBBS is getting paranoid - or else everyone she meets is spying on her in A DANGEROUS PLACE (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99), the latest installment of Jacqueline Winspear's consistently interesting series about a trained psychologist turned private investigator. Maisie is still in shock from the personal losses she has suffered in the four years since we've last seen her. She's sailing home to England from India when she stops off in Gibraltar, which is not a healthy place to be in 1937, with civil war raging across the border in Spain, German bombers headed for Guernica and foreign operatives skulking around every corner. Try as she might to concentrate on a murder case, she's drawn into a climate of political intrigue that repels her - but keeps the rest of us avidly reading.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 22, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Joy's first novel is an uncompromising noir, its downward thrust pulling like quicksand on both the characters and the reader. And, yet, there is poetry here, too, as there is in Daniel Woodrell's novels, the kind of poetry that draws its power from a doomed character's grit in the face of disaster. And Jacob McNeely, the son of a meth dealer in hardscrabble North Carolina, is surely doomed, as is his stoned mother and even his all-powerful father. It's only a question of what form that doom will take: Will Jacob continue to be enslaved to his father, or will he attempt to break away when the world tells him no escape is possible? Answering questions like that is what keeps noir fans coming back for more. In Jacob's case, it's also listening to him think about his girlfriend, Maggie, who just might have a way out: We just stood there with that June sun beating down on us, both of us lost, but only her having somewhere to go. Joy, on the other hand, definitely has a place to go. This is the start of a very promising fiction-writing career.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
North Carolina memoirist Joy (Growing Gills) sets his gripping first novel in his native Appalachia. Jacob McNeely, the 18-year-old son of a meth-addicted mother and a sociopathic father who operates a drug ring, has always believed he can't transcend his roots. But when his childhood sweetheart, Maggie Jennings, graduates from high school, she asks him to leave the mountains with her, and he begins to envision a life free of his family legacy. Threats to his father's business provoke violence, however, ensnaring Jacob in murder and betrayal even as he plans his escape. Despite his recreational drug use and propensity for violence, he has a capacity for selfless love that will keep readers invested in his struggle. Some Appalachian clichés and repetitive descriptions don't detract from the tragic, absorbing plot. Engaging characters, a well-realized setting, and poetic prose establish Joy as a novelist worth watching. Agent: Julia Kenny, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Upon turning 16, Jacob McNeely drops out of high school to work for his father, who runs a meth ring in the mountains of western North Carolina. A few years later, he is tasked with disposing of Robbie-one of his father's meth suppliers-but the killing is botched when Robbie is found, barely alive. At the same time, Jacob's attempt at rekindling his relationship with ex-girlfirend Maggie is thwarted when he is arrested for assaulting Maggie's new boyfriend. Tension escalates among the McNeely family members as Jacob's father becomes paranoid that Robbie will squeal to the cops about Jacob's role. VERDICT Readers of Southern grit lit in the tradition of Daniel Woodrell and Harry Crews will enjoy this fast-paced debut thriller by the author of Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman's Journey. Fan of Ron Rash's novels will appreciate the intricate plot and Joy's establishment of a strong sense of place in his depiction of rural Appalachia.-Russell Michalak, Goldey-Beacom Coll. Lib., Wilmington, DE (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The father's a killer, the mother's an addict, and the son's just plain trapped in this blunt-force account of an Appalachian family.Charlie McNeely controls the lucrative crystal meth business in his neck of the woods; his estranged wife, Laura, is one of his customers. The work involves killing; real men kill, and the rest are pussies, according to Charlie. Having cops on his payroll provides protection. With bad McNeely blood in his veins, the self-loathing 18-year-old Jacob sees himself as trash. Two years earlier, he broke up with his childhood sweetheart, Maggie, not wanting to drag her into the abyss. Now Jacob is facing a manhood test Daddy has set up. (As narrator, he calls his parents Daddy and Mama.) Robbie Douglas, an employee, has snitched and must be disposed of. In the deep-woods shack, he finds the Cabe brothers, also employees, have Robbie tied up and bleeding. The brothers splash him with sulfuric acid and leave him for dead on the mountainside. It was a sloppy job. Robbie is found, unconscious but alive. Now it's the Cabes' turn. Big Daddy beats them bloody, shoots them and has Jacob help him dump them in the lake. Jacob is now accessory to two, maybe three murders, and his situation becomes even more dire when he discovers his blood-soaked Mama, who has shot herself at his Daddy's urging. Still, there's a glimmer of hope when Maggie, who is a Good Woman, returns to him, saying "You're the strongest man I know." Might Jacob overcome his fatalism? Joy struggles with that, just as he struggles to give complexity to that dead-eyed evildoer of a father, but he ultimately finds it simplest to obey his first commandment: Shed blood. A dark semiautobiographical first novel in which action flourishes at the expense of character development. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
