November 30, 2020
Read (Ash Falls) serves up a gripping tale of crime, intrigue, and complicated family relationships. Rodney Culver, 12, lives with his parents Rose and Gil in inaptly named Hope, Wyo., in 1976. His parents’ marriage is just one argument away from falling apart, and when it does, Gil moves out. Rose soon takes up with small-time thief Otis Dell, who later moves in and starts bringing Rodney along for break-ins to appear less suspicious. Otis’s old jailhouse buddy Lester Fanning, meanwhile, is shacked up with a girlfriend in remote Whiskey Hills, Wash. Otis, on the run from the cops after a job went sideways, takes Rodney out of school and up to Whiskey Hills to hide out, and they’re soon caught up in more trouble with Lester’s scheme harboring undocumented immigrants. There, sheriff Louis Youngman and his deputy Mitchell King have been suspicious of Lester for years, and after they discover a dead body, their scrutiny intensifies. Read’s edgy and sparse prose fit the mood perfectly: “The sky would be crowded with black fists, and something horrible would be waiting on the next page.” This hard-hitting literary noir is a real knuckle-biter.