Peanut Elegy

A burglary.

An accidental death.

Four giant jars of peanut butter.

What could possibly go wrong?

In the fading Appalachian town of Pine Hollow, opportunities have become as scarce as coal. The mine is gone. Jobs have disappeared. Outsiders are buying up riverfront property. The people who built the town feel like strangers in their own home.

For brothers Mike and Danny Caldwell, desperation has become a way of life.

Their plan is simple: break into the local hardware store, steal thousands of dollars’ worth of power tools, and sell them online.

Instead, their cousin Jimmy accidentally shoots himself.

Panic takes over.

Convinced they’ve remembered the perfect way to destroy the evidence from a late-night crime show, the brothers buy four industrial-sized jars of peanut butter at Costco and head for the woods.

There’s just one problem.

Danny has a life-threatening peanut allergy.

As one disastrous decision leads to another, the brothers find themselves lying to emergency room doctors, dodging suspicious deputies, inventing increasingly ridiculous cover stories, and trying to stay one step ahead of Deputy Sara Blake—the smartest investigator in Pine Hollow and the only person who suspects this isn’t just another small-town burglary.

Meanwhile, an overconfident sheriff becomes convinced a Mexican drug cartel has chosen Pine Hollow as its newest dumping ground, sending the investigation in exactly the wrong direction.

Set against the backdrop of a struggling Appalachian community wrestling with economic decline, addiction, and change, Peanut Elegy is a darkly funny crime novel about family, loyalty, bad luck, and the catastrophic consequences of ordinary people making extraordinary mistakes.

For readers who enjoy the dark humor of the Coen Brothers, the sharp crime writing of Elmore Leonard, and the small-town atmosphere of Carl Hiaasen with an Appalachian twist, Peanut Elegy is a comedy where every attempt to fix a problem only makes it worse.

Sometimes the biggest crimes aren’t committed by criminals.

They’re committed by people who just keep making bad decisions.