Cry Father
A Book Club Recommendation!
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The second novel from the critically acclaimed writer of Pike, which was nominated for France’s prestigious Grand Prix de Littérature Policière crime fiction award and “easily rivals Larry Brown’s most renowned novels” (Spinetingler Magazine). In the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and Larry Brown comes a haunting story about men, their fathers, their sons, and the legacy of violence.
For Patterson Wells, disaster is the norm. Working alongside dangerous, desperate, itinerant men as a tree clearer in disaster zones, he's still dealing with the loss of his young son. Writing letters to the boy offers some solace. The bottle gives more.
Upon a return trip to Colorado, Patterson stops to go fishing with an old acquaintance, only to find him in a meth-induced delirium and keeping a woman tied up in the bathtub. In the ensuing chain of events, which will test not only his future but his past, Patterson tries to do the right thing. Still, in the lives of those he knows, violence and justice have made of each other strange, intoxicating bedfellows.
Hailed as “the next great American writer” (Frank Bill, author of Crimes in Southern Indiana), Benjamin Whitmer has crafted a literary triumph that is by turns harrowing, darkly comic, and wise.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Whitmer (Pike) continues his gritty and gruesome streak with a second novel full of drugs, gratuitous violence, and down-and-out characters searching for fulfillment that never comes. Patterson Wells, who works as a tree trimmer in disaster zones, is left a shell of a man after his son, misdiagnosed by a careless doctor, dies from an unknown disease. When Patterson returns to his desolate life on the Colorado mesa, his marriage now over, he befriends Junior, a drug runner and cokehead prone to bouts of extreme aggression. Among the pair's many brutal adventures, including (too) many blood-soaked ballroom brawls and a lethal dust-up with a crazed meth addict, the most dire is their involvement with a Mexican drug cartel. Meanwhile, in sporadic chapters, Patterson writes letters to his dead son that seem more like tools for Whitmer to fill in the disconnected holes in Patterson's dismal background (his work in post-Katrina New Orleans, his father's suicide, his ex-wife's brief affair that resulted in a pregnancy) than anything else. With an explosive finale that delivers more of the same, this bloodbath isn't for the faint of heart or stomach. More people are dead, but Patterson's back to square one.
