Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter - Tom Franklin

This is going to sound totally counter-intuitive but I was taking Crooked Letter back to the library and thinking, Self, that book was RAD, and then as I went to pop it in the return slot, I realized I hadn't ever finished it.  I was TEN PAGES FROM THE END!  I LACKED OFFICIAL CLOSURE!  And was still rocking on its groove.

(Obviously I sat in the library foyer and finished it.)

Ok so.  'The Rutherford girl had been missing for eight days when Larry Ott returned home and found a monster waiting in his house.'  Call me philistine, I will gladly turn in my monocle and pipe if I can have opening lines like THAT every day of my life.  Missing girls!  Monsters!  Characters SHOT through the HEART within the first chapter!  Moar this, plz.

Larry Ott ('Scary Larry' to the under-twelve [and much of the over-twelve {who were, to be fair, under twelve when Larry ALLEGEDLY killed that other girl who is not the Rutherford girl, so they can't really help it}] crowd) once allegedly killed a girl who is not the Rutherford girl, and now the Rutherford girl has gone missing.

Meanwhile, Silas Jones has a Very Dirty Secret, namely that he and Scary Larry used to be bffs (and more [but not in the way that you're thinking]) and that's kept on the down-low because everyone in this podunk town is convinced that Larry killed that other girl (whose body was never found) AND has probably now snagged the Rutherford lass.  Oh yes, and Silas is a Respectable Cop With A Respectable Paramedic Girlfriend And A Life Of Respecticism, which does not jive well with Potentially Murderous Besties.

But Silas also has A WHOLE OTHER SECRET which I will also keep secret from you, because secrets aside (secrets are never aside.  Secrets are the reason I will keep reading a Wholly Terrible Book to the end.  Do you hear me, mediocre authors!  Lade your book with SECRETS and probably also MAD RELATIVES and I will be helpless in your clutches.  But make sure the payoff is at least a severed head), Crooked Letter is worth reading on the basis of its Southern-drenched prose alone.  It's so very '"I shall return," he said and rose and walked off like a fisherman, not even pausing as the swamp began, slogging out, lowering with each step as if descending a staircase, his wake gently dissolving behind him.'  Do you see, Henry James!?  That is how you do a multi-comma'd, poly-clausal sentence without making me punchy.  *cracks open Wings of the Dove, punches*

Read it, y'alls.  Read it now while it is summer and hot and you can empathize, or read it later when it's cold and you play Sunny In My Mind.

Eight and a half caterpillars.