About Books: Spring 2019
Broken Field
By Jeff Hull
Told from the perspective of a high school girl and a football coach, Jeff Hull’s second novel reveals the tensions that tear at the fabric of a small town when a hazing incident threatens a championship season. Broken Field is set on the high prairie of Montana, in small towns scattered across vast landscapes.
Life is dusty and hard, and men are judged by their labor. Women have to be tougher yet. That’s what 16-year-old Josie Frehse learns as she struggles to meet the expectations of her community while fumbling with her own desires.
Tom Warner coaches the Dumont Wolfpack, an eight-man football team. The coach is stumbling through life, numbed by the death of his own young son and the dissolution of his marriage. But he’s jolted into taking sides when his star players are accused of a hazing incident that happened right under his nose.
“A sharp-eyed, often touching portrait of a fractured community and a harshly beautiful landscape,” writes Kirkus.
Hull, who lives in Huson, is also the author of a collection of essays, Streams of Consciousness, and the novel, Pale Morning Done.
The New Iberia Blues
By James Lee Burke
Murder and mayhem collide when a Hollywood film crew comes to town in James Lee Burke’s latest novel, set in his beloved New Iberia, LA.
A young black woman is found, crucified and floating in the bayou on a wooden cross. So begins a gruesome string of murders, linked only by tarot symbols and a Maltese cross.
Detective Dave Robicheaux is convinced it has something to do with the charismatic film director Desmond Cormier and his feckless entourage of writers and producers, even as his brilliant, headstrong daughter Alafair begins dating a producer, and gets pulled deeper into the morass.
The aging police detective’s pulse is disrupted by his lovely new partner, 28-year-old Bailey Ribbons – a woman who sensuously evokes the female lead in “My Darling Clementine.” a 1946 film about another righteous lawman.
Complicating matters further is the reappearance of a bizarre little hitman, known as Smiley, who sees himself as protector of the young and innocent, while masterfully killing the not-so-innocent.
As usual, sidekick Clete Purcel rumbles across the pages. “Mind if I tag along, do oversight, make sure things stay under control?” the massive ex-cop asks Robicheaux. Of course, he does none of these things, and still manages to save the day.
“We would never change the world, but by the same token, the world would never change us,” Robicheaux ruminates after the dust settles. May the world never change Burke, our state’s best known and most acclaimed author, “his storied lyricism drawing on a new range of powerfully resonant minor chords …” (Booklist)
– Kristi Niemeyer
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