But returning home from an afternoon swimming at a remote waterhole filled by the downpour, fourteen-year-old Tommy and sixteen-year-old Billy meet with a shocking tragedy. Thirsting for vengeance against the man they believe has wronged them—their former Aboriginal stockman—the distraught brothers turn to the ruthless and cunning John Sullivan, the wealthiest landowner in the region and their father’s former employer.
Sullivan gathers a posse led by the dangerous and fascinating Inspector Edmund Noone and his Queensland Native Police, an infamous arm of British colonial power charged with the "dispersal" of indigenous Australians to "protect" white settler rights. Two brothers are exposed to the brutal realities of life and the seductive cruelty of power in this riveting debut novel—a story of savagery and race, injustice and honor, set in the untamed frontier of 1880s Australia—reminiscent of Philipp Meyer’s The Son and the novels of Cormac McCarthy.
An epic tale of revenge and survival, only killers and Thieves is a gripping and utterly transporting debut, bringing to vivid life a colonial Australia that bears a striking resemblance to the American Wild West in its formative years. It is 1885, and a crippling drought threatens to ruin the McBride family.
When the rain finally comes, it is a miracle that renews their hope for survival.
Gods of Howl Mountain: A Novel
Bootlegger rory docherty has returned home to the fabled mountain of his childhood - a misty wilderness that holds its secrets close and keeps the outside world at gunpoint. His grandmother, maybelline “granny May” Docherty, opposes this match for her own reasons, believing that "some things are best left buried.
A folk healer whose powers are rumored to rival those of a wood witch, she concocts potions and cures for the people of the mountains while harboring an explosive secret about Rory’s mother - the truth behind her long confinement in a mental hospital, during which time she has not spoken one word. Between deliveries to roadhouses, and private clients, evades federal agents, he lives with his formidable grandmother, brothels, and stokes the wrath of a rival runner.
In the mill town at the foot of the mountains - a hotbed of violence, moonshine, and the burgeoning sport of stock-car racing - Rory is bewitched by the mysterious daughter of a snake-handling preacher. When rory's life is threatened, Granny must decide whether to reveal what she knows.
The River of Kings: A Novel
Howard frank mosher, author of god's kingdomin the river of kings, their father’s tangled past, bestselling author of Fallen Land Taylor Brown artfully weaves three narrative strands—two brothers’ journey down an ancient river, and the buried history of the river’s earliest people—to evoke a legendary place and its powerful hold on the human imagination.
The altamaha river, georgia’s “Little Amazon, ” is one of the last truly wild places in America. As the brothers proceed downriver, the first european artist in North America, their story alternates with that of Jacques le Moyne, who accompanied a 1564 French expedition that began as a search for riches and ended in a bloody confrontation with Spanish conquistadors and native tribes.
Twining past and present in one compelling narrative, the River of Kings is Taylor Brown’s second novel: a dramatic and rewarding adventure through history, and illustrated with drawings that survived the 1564 expedition, myth, and the shadows of family secrets. Hunter is a college student, lawton a navy seal on leave; they were raised by an angry, enigmatic shrimper who loved the river, and whose death remains a mystery that his sons are determined to solve.
The altamaha is even rumored to harbor its own river monster, as well as traces of the oldest European fort in North America. Brothers hunter and lawton Loggins set off to kayak the river, bearing their father’s ashes toward the sea.
Fallen Land: A Novel
. In the end, as they intersect with the scorching destruction of Sherman's March, the couple seek a safe haven where they can make a home and begin to rebuild their lives. Callum, a seasoned horse thief at fifteen years old, came to America from his native Ireland as an orphan. Ava, her father and brother lost to the war, hides in her crumbling home until Callum determines to rescue her from the bands of hungry soldiers pillaging the land, leaving destruction in their wake.
Pursued relentlessly by a murderous slave hunter, tracking dogs, the couple race through a beautiful but ruined land, and ruthless ex-partisan rangers, surviving on food they glean from abandoned farms and the occasional kindness of strangers. Dramatic and thrillingly written with an uncanny eye for glimpses of beauty in a ravaged landscape, Fallen Land is a love story at its core, and an unusually assured first novel by award-winning young author Taylor Brown.
.
High White Sun
Sometimes we have to be wolves. As chris tries to remake and modernize his corrupt department, friends and enemies unable to let go of the past, bringing in new deputies, including young America Reynosa and Ben Harper--a hard-edged veteran homicide detective now lured out of retirement--he finds himself constantly staring down a town unwilling to change, and the harsh limits of his badge.
But it's only when a local rio grande guide is brutally and inexplicably murdered, and America and Ben's ongoing investigation is swept aside by a secretive federal agent, that the novice sheriff truly understands just how tenuous his hold on that badge really is. And as other new threats rise right along with the unforgiving west texas sun, a high-ranking member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas and the patriarch of a murderous clan that's descended on Chris's hometown of Murfee; or Thurman Flowers, nothing can prepare Chris for the high cost of crossing dangerous men such as John Wesley Earl, a part-time pastor and full-time white supremacist hell-bent on founding his violent Church of Purity in the very heart of the Big Bend.
Before long, and outgunned--inexorably drawn into a nearly twenty-year vendetta that began with a murdered Texas Ranger on a dusty highway outside of Sweetwater, Chris, and that can only end with fire, and Ben are outmaneuvered, blood, outnumbered, America, and bullets in Murfee's own sun-scorched streets.
.
Bearskin: A Novel
More bears are killed on the preserve and Rice’s obsession with catching the poachers escalates, leading to hostile altercations with the locals and attention from both the law and Rice’s employers. It’s a powerful debut and an absolute showcase of exceptional prose. Bearskin is visceral, smells, raw, and compelling—filled with sights, and sounds truly observed.
There are very few first novels when I feel compelled to circle brilliant passages, but James McLaughlin’s writing had me doing just that. C. J. Partnering with his predecessor, a scientist who hopes to continue her research on the preserve, Rice puts into motion a plan that could expose the poachers but risks revealing his own whereabouts to the dangerous people he was running from in the first place.
James mclaughlin expertly brings the beauty and danger of Appalachia to life. The result is an elemental, slow burn of a novel—one that will haunt you long after you turn the final page.
The Far Empty
Craig johnson, new york times bestselling author of the Walt Longmire series In this gritty crime debut set in the stark Texas borderlands, an unearthed skeleton will throw a small town into violent turmoil. Seventeen-year-old caleb ross is adrift in the wake of the sudden disappearance of his mother more than a year ago, and is struggling to find his way out of the small Texas border town of Murfee.
. Told by a longtime federal agent who knows the region, it’s a debut novel you won’t soon forget. When skeletal remains are discovered in the surrounding badlands, the two are inexorably drawn together as their efforts to uncover Murfee’s darkest secrets lead them to the same terrifying suspect: Caleb’s father and Chris’s boss, the charismatic and feared Sheriff Standford “Judge” Ross.
.
Country Dark
Tucker, a young veteran, returns from war to work for a bootlegger. He falls in love and starts a family, and while the Tuckers don’t have much, they have the love of their home and each other. Chris offutt is an outstanding literary talent, whose work has been called “lean and brilliant” New York Times Book Review and compared by reviewers to Tobias Wolff, Ernest Hemingway, and Raymond Carver.
Cain, with a noose tightening evermore around a man who just wants to protect those he loves. His first work of fiction in nearly two decades, Country Dark is a taut, compelling novel set in rural Kentucky from the Korean War to 1970 . The story of people living off the land and by their wits in a backwoods Kentucky world of shine-runners and laborers whose social codes are every bit as nuanced as the British aristocracy, Country Dark is a novel that blends the best of Larry Brown and James M.
.
In the Season of Blood and Gold
These are stories, in short, meditations, verses, and accusations-everything, you could hope to get from important fiction.
When the Lion Feeds The Courtney Series: The When The Lion Feeds Trilogy Book 1
He started to run. Brothers by birth. When garrick is forced to take ownership of their farm, the women who will fall for his charms, Sean must explore the opportunities awaiting him: the rush and horrors of the Zulu Wars, the rise and fall of gold fever and the deadly thrills of big game hunting on the African plains.
A dark pall, still so far off that they could not distinguish the individual birds: only a shadow, a thin dark shadow in the sky. N'yoni', said Mbejane softly and Sean saw them. A courtney series adventure - book 1 in the when the lion Feeds trilogyA Courtney series adventure: When the Lion Feeds trilogy - Book 1 "'What is it?' Sean felt the first tingle of alarm.
Watching it Sean was suddenly cold in the hot noonday sun. Natal, 1860; the Courtney twins are born. Enemies by blood.
The Fighter
Guided by what she calls her "church of coincidence, " Annette pushes Jack toward redemption, only to discover that the world of Big Momma Sweet is filled with savage danger. Damaged by regret, jack is forced to step into the fighting pit one last time, crippled by twenty-five years of fists and elbows, heartbroken by his own betrayals, the stakes nothing less than life or death.
Yet this sudden reversal of fortunes introduces an unlikely savior in the form of a sultry, tattooed carnival worker. And so is the woman who gave it to jack, the foster mother only days away from dying, her mind eroded by dementia, the family legacy she entrusted to Jack now owned by banks and strangers.
And jack's mind has begun to fail, too. The decades of bare-knuckle fighting are now taking their toll, as concussion after concussion forces him to carry around a stash of illegal painkillers and a notebook of names that separates friend from foe. Hijacked by a sleazy gambler out to settle a score, jack is robbed of the money that will clear his debt with Big Momma Sweet--the queen of Delta vice, whose deep backwoods playground offers sin to all those willing to pay--and open a path that could lead him back home.
.