Blood-Stained Kings
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Tom Willock’s first book, Green River Rising, earned the kind of reviews that are rarely accorded to most so-called literary thrillers. This remarkable debut was hailed for its rich, powerful writing as well as its dramatic, page-turning suspense. The New York Times Book Review called it “beautifully vivid” and “triumphantly realized,” while People called it “as fine a thriller as one could ask for.”
The author’s much-anticipated second novel is as powerful and ambitious as its predecessor. Set in New Orleans and the rural South, it is the story of a chain of cataclysmic events let loose by the murder of Clarence Jefferson, a legendary lawman who has gathered a cache of evidence that could imprison corrupt politicians in five states. His last act, it appears, was to handpick two people as the unlucky heirs of his potentially explosive evidence files. The pair must either dispose of them as fast as they can or—at considerable risk to themselves—deliver the files to the authorities. Lenna Parillaud and Dr. Cicero Grimes, Jefferson’s “beneficiaries,” have never met. Lenna, a millionaire businesswoman, has been racked by grief and rage over the loss of her daughter. Dr. Grimes is a clinically depressed psychiatrist. Though both have burdens enough of their own, they are swept up into this story of Southern violence, passion, and vengeance, the likes of which perhaps only the readers of Willocks’s previous novel can imagine.
Compared by critics to Norman Mailer, James Ellroy, Stephen Hunter, and Andrew Vachss, Willocks offers a unique amalgam of gritty realism and something more—a depth and intensity that is seldom achieved in popular fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like the swamplands of its Southern setting, this noir thriller pulls the reader irresistibly into its thick, suffocating darkness. Willocks, a British psychiatrist who set his first novel, Green River Rising, inside a Texas prison, explores another quintessentially grim American locale, a Southern landscape that stretches from New Orleans to the backwoods of Georgia. It is here that Lenna Parillaud, a deranged former belle who has imprisoned her husband on their decaying plantation for the last 13 years, crosses paths with Gene Grimes, a dissipated physician with skeletons in his closet. The catalyst for their collision is mutual acquaintance Clarence Jefference, a corrupt cop whose reported death sends them scrambling to find the files where he kept dirt on everyone he knew. Before the novel's bloody climax, they are joined by Gene's cold-blooded but lovable dad, Lenna's illegitimate daughter, Ella, and her vengeful husband, whose escape sets off the chain reaction of betrayal, murder and depravity that energizes the plot. Willocks jettisons much of the intellectual baggage that encumbered Green River Rising (1993) and finds a perfect balance in his narrative between philosophical reflection and physical action. His hardscrabble characters are perhaps a little too fond of quoting great works of literature, but their familiarity with Aristotle and the Bible amplifies the plot's overtones of classic tragedy. Violent, literate and unashamed of its grotesque depictions of human evil, this is one of the most entertaining hard-boiled crime novels since James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential. 50,000 first printing; major ad/promo. FYI: Publication will coincide with the release of the film Swept from the Sea, which Willocks scripted and co-produced.
