World, Chase Me Down
A Novel
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2018 Nebraska Book Award for Fiction
A rousing, suspenseful debut novel—True Grit meets Catch Me If You Can—based on the forgotten true story of a Robin Hood of the American frontier who pulls off the first successful kidnapping for ransom in U.S. history
“A kidnapper with a social-justice mission” (Time), Pat Crowe was once the most wanted man in America. World, Chase Me Down resurrects him, telling the electrifying story of the first great crime of the last century: how in 1900 the out-of-work former butcher kidnapped the teenage son of Omaha’s wealthiest meatpacking tycoon for a ransom of $25,000 in gold, and then burgled, safe-cracked, and bond-jumped his way across the country and beyond, inciting a manhunt that was dubbed “the thrill of the nation” and a showdown in the court of public opinion between the haves and have-nots—all the while plotting a return to the woman he never stopped loving. As if channeling Mark Twain and Charles Portis, Andrew Hilleman has given us a character who is bawdy and soulful, grizzled, salty, and hard-drinking, and with a voice as unforgettable as that of Lucy Marsden in Alan Gurganus’s Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All—an antihero you can’t help rooting for.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lively first novel, Hilleman re-imagines the life of a turn-of-the-20th-century kidnapper who committed the first "crime of the century." On Dec. 18, 1900, Pat Crowe and his accomplice, Billy Cavanaugh, abduct the 16-year-old son of Edward Cudahy, owner of a meatpacking plant in Omaha, Neb. During the abduction, Cudahy recognizes Pat, forcing the kidnapper to go on the lam to Japan, then South Africa, where he fights with the Boer army. Arrested after more misadventures back in the U.S., Pat is put on trial, finding himself a political pawn of the haves and a folk hero to the have-nots. In flashbacks we see Pat's marriage to a woman named Hattie and what transpired with Cudahy to inspire the kidnapping. A framing device places Pat in the 1930s, where, among other things, he tries to make himself useful to detectives in Hopewell, N.J., investigating the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Although the story is based on a variety of firsthand accounts, the author refuses to be bound by facts alone, and the result is a raucous example of narrative invention. Pat makes for an enthusiastic narrator, and he ends his story on a surprising note that affirms man's infinite capacity for resilience in the face of life's harsh vicissitudes.
