FINALLY, I have tracked down the author/title
of a book Kirkus Reviews praised for it fresh Southern voice: My Brother's Destroyer - Baer Creighton Book 1 - by Clayton Lindemuth
How did I find it?
By scrolling through my own Twitter feed. I knew I'd tweeted the link. I googled a hundred ways to Sunday but couldn't locate it by talking dog, brother in the title, etc.
I had downloaded a sample chapter. Didn't buy the book, even at $2.99 - it just didn't sound as authentic to me as Diane Ryan's High Kill.
The Kirkus Review:
....a moonshiner who goes up against the local mob in this rural noir novel.
....middle-aged Baer Creighton brews moonshine, nurses old heartaches, and keeps away from the local crime boss, Joe Stipe. Baer ...prefers the company of his beloved pit bull, Fred, to that of people. When Stipe and his dogfighting cronies kidnap Fred and force the animal to fight for its life, the oft-drunk Baer swears revenge.
....Lindemuth writes in a Southern dialect that perfectly evokes the woods and hollows of the Carolina hills. Baer’s voice is as textured as the landscape (“All my life I got out the way so the liars and cheats could go on lying and cheating one another. I can spot a liar like nobody”), and the brutal acts that he describes are timeless and primal. Even within the bounds of this vernacular, Lindemuth manages to fashion sharp observations: “Cory Smylie was irredeemable, but given the vastness of Stipe’s enterprise, odd jobs presented that were uniquely suited to irredeemable men.” The book is on the long side and would perhaps have benefited from the removal of a few scenes. But the world of Gleason is so immersive and Baer’s vendetta so oddly compelling that readers will forgive some occasional bloat. Fans of noir tales set in rural America will particularly welcome this addition to the genre.
A harsh but often engaging novel rendered in incantatory country language.
Too much hype, too much self-aggrandizement, too many winks from the author to the reader, for me:
From the Author
Baer Creighton was a fun character to write. He's a cross between a half-drunk MacGyver and I don't know what, a deeply moral redneck. He feels physical pain when people lie, and given the amount of that going on, he's a recluse. So when his story unfolds and he starts finding conflict in every direction, all while trying to hew to a super-moral code that vengeance has to be scaled to the harm received, there are plenty of quirks for an author to exploit to keep the drama tense and the humor dark.
About Clayton Lindemuth
Am I right? You're smarter than most, embrace old fashioned morals, love your country, dogs, and guns... and dig ruthless fiction... Hi! I'm Clayton Lindemuth, and my novels embrace
rural noir truth. Mind your own business, be slow to anger.
But don't ever back down to evil. Justice happens when the wicked die.
If we're tracking so far, I wrote My Brother's Destroyer, and all the rest, just for you.
You'll stay awake too late, underline fun new ways to cuss, muse about new philosophies and read random passages to strangers to make the world a better place.
Literary depth. Thriller pace.
If you've got the stomach to watch evil men die, dress for the woods and grab a lamp. We've work to do.
Maybe I should give that novel another chance, but why bother. Too many other books out there. Like Diane Ryan's High Kill.
Without any wink-wink self-promotion, Diane Ryan delivers literary, authentic, southern-voice, rural-noir fiction.