Above the Waterfall
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Nothing else comes so I set the notebook beside me. What else is here? I ask myself and listen. This section of stream purls and riffles amid small stones. What word might be made for what I hear . . .
Les Clary's final case has broken the still surface of his backwater town.
Becky, a park ranger with her own mysterious past, shares Les's consolation in the natural world that lies just beyond their hopelessly broken town. As Les and Becky explore of the county's lyrically beautiful landscape, they finds themselves led deeper into the heart of the town's corruption, and into the darkness of their own ruptured histories.
This haunting novel is a poetic journey into the wilderness of the heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rash's (Nothing Gold Can Stay) widely celebrated style lends his Southern Gothic tinged books a suppleness that verges on prose poetry and, in the case of his new novel, elevates a small-town noir story. Les is a gentle sheriff on the verge of retirement in meth-wracked Appalachia, troubled by the petty rivalries that tear at his North Carolina community and his uncertain love affair with park ranger Becky Lytle. Following a nightmarish raid on a meth house, Les becomes drawn into the case of Gerald Blackwelder, a local eccentric accused of poisoning a trout stream in a land dispute. Gerald's only advocate is Becky but as a one-time associate of an infamous ecoterrorist named Richard Pelfrey, she's been wrong before. Operating on opposing sides of an intrigue that touches on family quarrels and sins of the past, Les and Becky unearth a caper heavy in rich Southern crime and violence, one that's a cut above the rest. Rash writes prose so beautifully that plot and character can come to seem like mere adornments, and certain touches such the poems Les writes in his off-hours feel like showcases. But there's no denying Rash's grasp of the North Carolina landscape and its reflection in the oft-tortured souls of its denizens, making this novel one of his most successful ventures into poetic humanism.
