This is the third book by Woodrell which I've read and I plan to get to everything he's written. I love his use of language, his intelligent and accurate depiction of low and not-so-low life. With simple economy and smooth plotting, he unwinds stories which surprise us with their developments. I think he writes some of the best characters and paying attention to them and what they are saying and doing in the immediate action diverts us from seeing the motives behind all that. Kind of like real life. I like the Rene Shade character a lot and hope that Woodrell will keep him around for further adventures. This book is very well-written and I recommend it highly!

When our book club chose this book as part of its new author day, I thought "what kind of trash is this." But like a good shot of moonshine, it was revolting enough to leave its mark and tasty enough to make me want more. HOnestly, why hasn't this guy gotten his due? There is more slick writing, quirky characters and raunchy adventure i nthis book then many books twice its length. And with the lead character a sort of hillbilly writer/philosopher (that is not a contradiction in terms!) one has a narrator throughout the book who never fails to make you laugh. THe book centers around the adventures of Redmond Doyle, a hack writer who returns home to the Ozarks from a more "high falutin" environment, only to find out that you cannot escape your past or your roots. As he gets pulled into the inevitable feuds and violence that is part of Ozark lore, he wonders why he ever left in the first place.With plenty of fights, sex, hillbilly weirdness and the ramblings of the main character, the book is liike a canoe ride down the river in Deliverance. It will make you squeal like a pig!

With this novel Woodrell, author of the Shade detective books and a fantastic historical novel called WOE TO LIVE ON, really moved into a great, seldom explored terrain. Doyle and the rest of his clan are what some would call [bad people]. Hillbillies. Rednecks. Whatever. Any such simplistic term could be easily applied, but what these characteres really are is human beings. And this is certainlyu to Woodrell's credit.

If you've never read Woodrell before, I'd say start here. This book is a kind of half-way mark between his older crime novels and his more recent and absolutely amazing TOMATO RED and THE DEATH OF SWEET MISTER. Imagine if Jim Thompson had written more books like POP. 1280, HEED THE THUNDER, and NOW AND ON EARTH and you might be hitting close to what Woodrell's up to.

Doyle is a writer who, after ditchinghis old life, stealing his ex-wife's car (complete with bad makeshift paintjob), ends up in the Ozarks working on a cash crop scheme...with his brother Smoke and Smoke's lady friend Big Annie and, I wouldn't dare forget, Big Annie's daughter, Niagra. What ensues is lust, blood, and more than a few good twists to keep you hooked in right up to the end.

Now, this is not Woodrell's best. Since I'm not Woodrell I can only guess that with this novel he was still testing out this new territory. By the time TOMATO RED came along, hellfire, the guy was smokin'! Read this, then go on and read everything that's come along since, but also be sure to go back and check out WOE TO LIVE ON for a take on the Civil War that those history teachers would've hated to relate.

One last night, for just a plain old good time, check out the three Rene Shade novels. It's fun to see a writer develope from just good to downright spectacular.

I loved this book. I've never read anything like it...it makes plain country folk cool. I'm glad I found another writer to add to my list of personal favorites.

Having read and admired several of Daniel Woodrell's books, I was very pleased to see that this one had been released.

As with the previous "Tomato Red", this one is well-written and wondrous in the simple, unadorned tone of the narration. However both of these books are difficult to gush over.

These are dark gems. And they lack the allure that the common reader expects.

When we are moved to feel joy or sorrow by an author, we have no trouble considering that genius is involved. With Woodrell though, the emotions are more complex. And he can stir up things which we might prefer to have left hidden and forgotten.

This is definitely genius. Especially when someone such as Woodrell accomplishes this with a subtlety that is remarkably profound.

In this book, we are given the sad story of thirteen-year-old, overweight Shug Atkins. His is about the furthest thing from an "aw shucks" coming-of-age tale you can get.

Shug and his mother Glenda live in a shack on the grounds of the cemetery they maintain. Here they are plagued by the abusive Red. Red may or may not be Shug's biological father -- he probably isn't but this has never been made clear to Shug. Despite that, Red acts the father role and displays some of the most despicable ways possible for a grown man -- he is definitely an inappropriate role model.

Glenda has always relied on her looks even though they haven't gotten her very far. She's about little more than sex and as age advances has little in her life but maintaining an anaesthetic level of drunkenness. Far from being a perfect mother, she is still Shug's most likely ally -- a relationship that has all the possibilities for the perverse one can imagine.

Shug's world is full of dysfunction. He has been exposed to drug and alcohol abuse, hardened criminality, illicit sexual behavior and all manner of wickedness. But he doesn't know any better. And in the course of this novel, things go from bad to worse. In the end, the situation is beyond help.

Where "Tomato Red" impressed me with a story of what tragedy might happen when people fail to follow society's norms, this book shows what happens to people who live by the norms and meet tragedy by tangling with people who do not play by those rules.

I felt stunned after reading this book. Honestly. I sat and thought about it and couldn't shake it. It was like having heard a bomb go off nearby -- too close to feel secure.

This is certainly a remarkable book.

Daniel Woodrell's last novel, Tomato Red, was about classism experienced by poor whites in the author's native Missouri Ozarks. Woodrell's latest, his seventh novel, The Death of Sweet Mister, has a tighter focus--more psychological, less sociological--that yields a jewel of a literary noir: Think of Oedipus Rex set in the backcountry, seasoned with a bit of James Ellroy. This is not an easy story to tell. Themes about incest among poor whites can easily lapse into the degrading stereotypes of genetic insufficiency attacked in Jim Goad's The Redneck Manifesto, and elsewhere. No, Woodrell has all the compassion for his characters that any literary master knows they need to live on the page. Although excellent, be warned, however, this is one of those "and they didn't live happily ever after" tales.

With Shuggie Akins, a obese, lonely, thirteen-year-old adrift among adult misfits, Woodrell again creates a first-person voice that convinces: The people, the place come alive wholly from inside--moreover, because of--Shuggie's language: "Our house looked as if it had been painted with jumbo crayons by a kid with wild hands who enjoyed bright colors but lost interest fast." Inventive linguistic genius of this sort goes on page after page and if at first a surfeit of these gems seems to slow the reading, don't worry: The voice creeps up on you and stays as an agreeable companion. Like a "Thunderbird (that) seemed to instantly comb the bumps from the road ahead to keep the ride always gentle," The Death of Sweet Mister reads smoothly.

At first, Shuggie's story seems about the rite of passage a teenage boy takes to manhood. But opportunities for Shuggie to bond with his petty criminal and abusive dad, Red, seem invariably to have two outcomes: stupefying disillusionment or, worse, schooling for a desperate life of crime. A fishing outing with Dad ends when Shuggie sent to wade in the river sees Red and girlfriend Patty engage in some "nasty clutching" inside the truck cab. And Shuggie's legal standing as a juvenile makes him Red's pawn for a series of burglaries to steal prescribed narcotics from the sick and doctors' offices.

Woodrell's fitting metaphorical logic for this tale of doom makes Shuggie and Mom Glenda the working caretakers of a cemetery. Shuggie steals "dope" from the sick, who later end up in his "bone orchard." With no real role models to make his transition to manhood a success, Shuggie falls into misdeeds on his own. We see character corruption, we see "the death of Sweet Mister"--Glenda's nickname for the son whose failed male bonding appears to seal his Oedipal fate.

Compared to Tomato Red, The Death of Sweet Mister is a darker tale because the characters do not dream a better life for them exists elsewhere. If the dream of escape kept characters in Tomato Red moving, for Shuggie, it's life with no exit. His only dream of another place, oddly enough, is Norway because that is where Vikings live. Certainly he was thinking of violent, berserkr Vikings, the sort that he already, in his own way, knew. When Shuggie grasps what cards life has dealt him, he lets out a primal scream for things held back. And then he goes about greeting the doom that is, at once, as inevitable as the cemetery where he and his mom live.

...and the colors on Daniel Woodrell's palette are dark ones. The characters in this novel spring to life before our mind's eye -- at once outrageous in their eccentricities and completely believable in their human frailties. Woodrell has an earlier novel that bears the subtitle 'a country noir' -- and that's a perfectly coined description for this work as well. These characters are bottom-feeders and cast-offs, doing what they can -- often out of sheer desperation -- to survive and scramble even a step or two up the perceived ladder of success. God help anyone who gets in their way.

'Sweet Mister' of the title is an overweight thirteen year-old boy. He is being raised by his continuously-drunk mother, Glenda, and her brutal, short-fused husband, Red. Red's parental connection to Sweet Mister is dubious at best -- the boy's mother alludes often and not-so-subtly to another, earlier man in her life, most likely the boy's father. She dotes on the boy -- she flaunts her overt sexuality at him in extremely inappropriate ways -- and this further aggrivates Red's feelings of jealousy toward the boy. Glenda's overly sexual posturing toward her son is most likely born out of her frustration in her relationship with Red -- a cruel man who claims her sexually when his needs arise, then tosses her aside to consort with whatever woman he fancies at the moment.

Red and his slimy buddy Basil -- his partner in a series of increasingly squalid and violent petty crimes -- draw the boy into their schemes, using him more and more overtly as the plot progresses. The tension in the story builds and builds with the power and implied danger of an old neglected boiler -- something has to give, and it does.

Woodrell has done his homework. I'm not sure where he calls home, but one thing is certain -- he's spent some time around characters like these, and he has learned to endow them with incredibly authentic voices and life-patterns. He knows them well -- and he creates them with vitality and looses them into this story with respect, allowing them to act out their parts in a manner true to themselves and to their situation.

It's not a pretty story -- but it's a gripping, well-written one, and VERY hard to put down. Without resorting to cheap stereotypes, the author has created an amazingly cinematic work here. I see Angelina Jolie as a perfectly sultry Brenda, Michael Rooker as the steaming Red, and Billy Bob Thornton as the weasely Basil. Let the filming begin...I think Billy Bob's directorial touches would be nice here also.

I suggest after reading this book that you take a drive out into the countryside, find a lonely, unlit dirt road, and get out of your car. See if you don't find yourself looking over your shoulder, missing the comfort of the city lights. They don't call it 'country dark' out there for nothing...

I was surprised, when reading this book, to immediately discover that it's the basis for the Ang Lee movie Riding with the Devil. I don't recall the book ever being credited in the movie. I hope Woodrell got his cut, because this is a wonderful book. It is written at a high standard of literary quality and the characters, despite their relative amorality, are engaging. The heroine is refreshingly un-Jewellike. This is one of the few books on the Civil War in Missouri that I've really enjoyed, and the excellent writing style is the primary reason. I give it four stars rather than five because the research -- on daily life in the period as well as the war itself -- seemed to be just a little scant. But this is certainly an excellent book.

Meaning no disrespect to Daniel Woodrell, who has created a little world of Louisiana mischief in a loosely-organized series of books (including "Woe to Live On", :Muscle for the Wing" ,etc.), but this little redneck departure runs right into Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridien. Set in the border country of the Civil War, when Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas had a bumper drop of high-minded, low-down killers (on both sides, now, don't get your backs up) whose horsemanship was matched only by their facility at righteously justifying every depravity. Woodrell could have written the dialogue for the "Outlaw Josey Wales", and these southerners talk with that odd mixture of Elizabethan and backwoods English which so charmed observers from afar during the Northern War of Yankee Aggression. I'm not sure that we are supposed to like his protagonists, whose ethical sense tends to be of the "I'll-hand-you-the-rope-but-I- won't-lynch-that-innocent" variety, but the tale is rousing, if bleak, and the possibility of redemption is vigourously pursued.

Finally and at last, the border war of Missouri/Kansas is having its story told. Here were no magnificent lines of battle with brave banners and an awe-struck foe admiring the fatal advance. Here were no bugle calls, no gold braid uniforms or gentleman officers in plumed hats. This was a dirty, vicious, strange-dogs-in-a-meathouse fight that shattered families, emptied neighborhoods, and sometimes created feuds that lasted generations after the war.

Daniel Woodrell writes with a remarkable style perfectly suited to the tale he tells. Taut, sparse, haunting, lyrical yet terrible, easing us lazily along from moments of unpretentious poetry to drop us jangling into stark, slamming violence. From the first page, I read it as drinking a rare liquor, sipping and savoring only a few pages a day, in no hurry to have it end.

Mr. Woodrell does not rub our faces in gore, but nor does he shrink from or glorify the brutality of killing. We have no doubt of what is happening, recoil from its horror, yet the image is drawn with such spare, severe strokes that we are left stunned as the aftermath of a car wreck - what just happened? When one character dies, the scene is engraved with a laser beam; "Oh, sweet Lord Jesus. It was way down there past terrible....My world bled to death."

Yet rather than being a story about a war and its battles, this a story about very young men - and women - whose lives are turned inside-out by that war. We see them involved in the very human struggle for place, for a sense of belonging, for those fleeting moments of gentleness, set against the smouldering, bloody backdrop of war, and jerked back to the bad-chili burning in the guts for payback when "comrades" are lost.

Rather than merely a war story, it is in part a love story, love of friend for friend, a man for a woman. There is no drippy sentimentality, no saccharine examinations of emotion. The same pen that strokes murder in sharp black lines etches with exquisite delicacy the gentler moments.

The reader may initially find the Victorian dialogue a bit awkard, but in only moments, there seems no other way the story could have been told. Nor do I feel that any other writer could have told this tale so well, save this native son of the Ozark country.

Told through the eyes of young Jake Roedel, who accepts what he sees with no idealism and only later any question, I recommend this book with a whole heart. Most especially I recommend it to those with an interest in the Missouri/Kansas conflict, or any part of the less-defined, personal aspects of the Civil War. For story, characterizations, marvelous use of language, and a haunting quality that lingers long after the last page is turned, I give it a solid five stars.

If you read all the reviews listed, you'll see a pattern develop. Great reviews raving about the author's way with words, his ear for dialect, his ability to paint a stunning, if bleak, portrait of the 'great unwashed' that inhabit these hills that I call home. I grew up within 50 miles of Woodrell's current home, and I'm here to tell you, this is the real thing. That boy's hitting the nail on the head. But if you read further you'll find other reviews. In them, someone will say 'I wasted my money on a book about white trash. I forced myself to finish it'. I'm sorry to see reviews like that about any of Woodrell's books. I could be wrong, but I don't think he's writing books for folks who have to force themselves to finish 'em. He's writing for those of us who relish tales about no-account hillbilly 2-time losers making bad decisions and living to regret it. Consider this a warning, if you're not happy reading about small town yokels who're tired of their boring lives, disgusted with poverty yet unable to escape it, losers plotting revenge on the local gentry for stomping on their dreams, just building up steam and ready to smash the next bossman who looks at them the wrong way...stay away. Do us all a favor and just stick with something you'll enjoy. This stuff's not for you. Spend your money on something sweeter, or with more car chases or whatever you enjoy. Those among you who think you'd like to read well crafted novel's that happen to be about some of life's castaway citizens, books where every word has been considered and all the flab slashed away, c'mon in, the water's fine. Be careful, you want to watch out where you put your feet. Some yokel's been breaking bottles around here. If I catch him at it, I'm gonna skin him alive and roll him in salt. Open up that cooler and hand me one of them there liquid bread bottles, hear?

Those who think they would have no interest in the poor white trash genre would be well advised to reconsider and put this on their reading lists. Despite being gritty Woodrell writes a convincing and sympathetic description of the other side of the tracks: the lumpen proletariat and aimless, and the roles to which they are relegated in society, and specifically small towns. The characters of "Tomato Red" are a small town whore, her eccentric grown children who seek to escape both her and the destiny to which they are condemned as her children in their small town, and the young redneck alcoholic misfit who clings to them. It is crude, graphic, and vulgar, but not excessively so, and these characteristics are essential to effectively painting this story. Woodrell makes essential and profound observations on alienation and the rigid barriers which maintain social stratification, and the savage consequences of challenging authority.

After reading this novel I was prompted to read other Woodrell works. While they are good, this is by far his best so far, and reflects a vast growth in his sophistication as an author.

This is one of those rare books that you keep thinking about after you've read it, and look forward to reading it again. Though I'm always hungry to read something different I found this so well written that I made a point of rereading it when I needed to immerse myself in something I knew would be good.

In this novel, the second I have read by this author, Daniel Woodrell shows once again how adept he is at capturing not only the rhythms of his characters' speech, but of their very lives. Involved, as they are, in petty crime, prostitution, drug use and gut-wrenching poverty, they are nonetheless shown to be human beings -- capable of love and devotion, even feats of heroism.

The main character, Sammy Barlach, is someone you'd probably cross the street to avoid if you saw him coming. The trouble for a few of the folks in this dark novel -- both poignant and comic, by turns -- is that they DON'T see Sammy coming, or at least they don't recognize the brooding power that lies within him, built up over years and years of clinging by his fingernails to the bottom rung of the social ladder.

Sammy finds himself involved with -- and subsequently taken in by -- two siblings and their mother. Jamalee and her brother Jason are poor but engaging -- they have dreams of getting out of the Venus Holler section of West Table, MO. They have a plan, and now it involves Sammy. Their mother, Bev, described aptly on the inside jacket, 'can turn a trick as easily as she can roll a joint'. Jamalee and Jason abhor (no homonymic pun intended) her prostituional lifestyle -- but at the same time that they resent her for this, they love her, and ache for what she has become.

Jason is a handsome young man -- the female customers at the hair salon where he is apprenticed swoon over him. His sister tells Sammy that 'grown women in the grocery store throw their panties at him with their numbers written on them in lipstick'. Jason's major difficulty in fitting in with his small community is that he happens to be gay -- a lifestyle not embraced by small-town Southerners, to say the least. At seventeen, it is a fact of his life with which he is still wrestling -- and it is painful to watch, as it must be for those who go through it in life. How can he be true to himself and somehow manage to suffer the slings and arrows hurled at him by an intolerant society?

The novel's action builds well to an almost unbearable pitch -- the other Woodrell novel I've read, THE DEATH OF SWEET MISTER, is equally gripping. Sammy narrates the story very effectively -- his phrasing and turns of speech are jewel-like -- and for an uneducated petty criminal with few social graces, he's a pretty amazing philosopher.

The book's finale is as heartbreaking as it is inevitable -- but this is definitely a journey I can recommend. Woodrell is a master -- I'm going to read everything by him I can find.

After starting out as a short story in the Missouri Review, this tale was expanded into the novel Woe to Live On, then made into a movie, by Ang Lee, as Ride With the Devil. Just to add to the confusion, the book was then rereleased in a movie tie-in version as Ride with the Devil. At any rate, it is a brisk, brutal, sometimes funny portrayal of a small band of Southern guerilla fighters, the First Kansas Irregulars, loosely associated with Quantrill (the Devil of the new title, as in "the Devil knows how to ride," a grudging compliment he was paid), as they carry out a series of increasingly bloody and senseless raids, killing men, women, children, and ultimately each other.

The narrator of the book is Jake Roedel, sixteen at its start, a young German orphan, often victimized by the surprising anti-German animus of his fellow bushwhackers. Woodrell makes a fairly daring choice in having the boy commit a brutality quite early in the book, thereby establishing that there is nothing romantic or heroic about their War. However, this also puts a considerable distance between the reader and the ostensible hero, making it hard to care too much about his eventual fate.

At least since Ken Burns's Civil War series there's been a tendency to look back at the War a little too fondly; and, of course, Southerners have been inclined to do so for much longer. This book offers a much needed antidote to such silliness, reminding us of just how ugly and wasteful a thing it was, and of how surely any war degrades into hatreds and killing, no matter how "noble" the cause..

GRADE : B-

As a boyhood fanatic of the Civil War including annual family trips made to places such as Vicksburg, Wilson's Creek, Pea Ridge and Shiloh, this reader has years of imagination when it comes to this country's bloodiest war. As an adult, I can now thank Daniel Woodrell for allowing me to rediscover the fascination. He has not only tapped into a real time and place of historical facts, but has explored them in a story with fantastic characters that schoolbooks never told you about. Bushwackers and ruffians! In the heart of an ever-expanding nation, the Kansas-Missouri border conflicts were in many ways the essense of the Civil War. But these American citizens were not caught-up in slavery, nor the heady politics. And they were not gallent, but nor were they cut-throat outlaws. They simply shared the common belief in individual rights and a undying thirst for revenge when injustice was committed. For them, war never possesses a clear winner. Death is everywhere. Property is destroyed. There is no law to abide other than kill who will kill you. Filled with brutality and horror, Ride With The Devil allows the reader to shuffle off the heroic efforts common among war epics and enjoy a different type of romance -- the truth of cruel war. Please take the time to read heartily as you can discover a people that we forgot about. Not to take away from the others, but this certainly belongs in a great new category away from Gone With The Wind, The Red Badge of Courage or the more recent Cold Mountain. Thank you Daniel Woodrell.

Civil war history buffs will love this novel, as the fiction dovetails quite well with historical facts. Some real-life characters appear briefly in this story (William Quantrill, Cole Younger and others) but not in a way that is disrespectful to historical accounts. One of the story's major fictional characters, Black John Ambrose, is evidently the real-life bushwacker Bloody Bill Anderson, who was notorious for his ruthless "no-parole" tactics. The story is full of wonderful conflicts. The main character, Jake Roedel, is distrusted by his Southern companions because of his German descent (most Germans were "Union men.") Yet the bushwacking band to which Jake belongs favors murdering his fellow Dutchmen. Another surprising character is Holt, the black man and former slave, fighting for the Southern cause out of loyalty to his 'owner' and friend George Clyde. I was also taken by the quality of the dialogue in this book. The characters speak with a language that is at once backwoodsy and eloquent. This book stands on it's own as a solid piece of work, but is even more enjoyable if you know some of the history on which it's based. For that, read The Devil Knows How To Ride (a Quantrill bio) by Edward Leslie. Then read this book, and while you're at it, rent the movie. You won't be sorry.

If you start with Tomato Red and work backwards, you can chart Woodrell's growth and maturity as a writer. Tomato's story of down-and-outers who consistently act contrary to their own best interests is both entertaining and riveting. The first-person narrative sets a mood that grabs you on the first page and never lets go. The third-person voice of The Ones You Do is not as assured, but the plot and characters are interesting, and Woodrell displays his characteristic flair for language and ear-catching dialogue.

Woodrell also has a way of evoking sympathy for people whose actions you can't condone, and the protagonist of The Ones, John X Shade, is as amusing as he is appalling. The sense of pathos in this novel improves upon its predecessor, Muscle for the Wing, which focuses on John's son, Rene. Muscle reads like a lesser Elmore Leonard novel transplanted to the Ozarks - a TV movie with crisper dialogue. The Ones has some of the same stock characters as Muscle - small-time criminals who underestimate their oppostion, well-endowed women who jump into bed all too eagerly, etc. But the decline in John X's skills in his older years and his humorous fatalism raise the story above that of a standard action hero.

Woodrell has written five "Ozark noir" novels and one about the Civil War, Woe to Live On. Each of the Ozark novels improves upon its predecessor, but that's not a reason to bypass his earlier work. In fact, what I enjoyed most was observing Woodrell's development of skills from one book to the next. Woe to Live On was only his second novel, but stands on its own as a very different and very affecting commentary on the war. Its first-person voice finds full flower in Give Us a Kiss and Tomato Red. I recommend immersing yourself in Woodrell's work for a while; if nothing else, you'll be entertained and learn how one writer honed his skill -- maybe there's hope for the rest of us!

Woodrell is a master of dark humor, peopleing his novels with characters who have yet to be housebroken. But with Woodrell the rough, rowdy and savage characters are very human - embracing both the good life and destructive fate with humor. Although the cover blurb leads one to expect Rene Shade as a major character, he is a sideline. His father John X. and ten-year-old half sister Etta are at the center of the story. Etta keeps her aged father going, getting him his first drink of the morning, serving sandwiches and beer at his poker games, and reading his every move ... sassing him back with his own words. This is a kid who cons her Dad into believing school starts November 9 for public school students, thus avoiding school. She is a memorable survivor.

Two love interests assist in creating a coherent image of the Shade family. Rene has fallen for a basketball player who is as unsure as he as to what future she wants. Tip has fallen for Gretel who is currently living in a home for pregnant women putting children up for adoption. Gretel is the product of a hippie couple surviving in the back woods on the standard government property cash crop and proud of their lack of conveniences. While she understands marriage to be a kind of death, living in a house with plumbing is a major life goal.

The plot would be predictable if it were not for humorous turns of fate. John X. is on the lam - his pursuer attempts to increase his capital by scamming a tourist couple who are scam artists themselves. A cockolded husband who's held a grudge for 40 years, goes to kill the agressor only to die of a heart attack ...

The writing is good quality - with turns of phrases here and there that are pleasant, memorable and believable surprises in the otherwise harsh environment.

So if you want to kick back, turn your mind off and read for sheer pleasure, Daniel Woodrell has again fit the bill.

If there was a rating lower than one star, I would use it.

This book is a real bottom feeder. It's filled with sludge....racism, profanity, dehumanization, sexism and, yes, violence as well. Since the author has other, better books the only possible excuse for this book is that he was trying to spoof the old hardboiled detective genre...and missed by about a million miles.

I can see no reason to explore the lives and motives of such stereotyped characters, who are thoroughly awful humans, shallow and (thank goodness!) unbelievable.

I am not easily offended, and in fact like some of this author's other work. But this book is a total waste of time and money.

Do yourself (and the author) a big favor and skip this one!

A great start to a great series! The "Rene Shade novels" by Daniel Woodrell will kick your royal petunia from here to kingdom come!