Cold Quiet Country

Cold Quiet Country

Clayton Lindemuth

Language: English

Pages: 326

ISBN: 1849821666

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Publishers Weekly Starred Review:
Lindemuth's impressive debut, set in the winter of 1971, is a go-for-the-jugular country noir. Josephus Bittersmith, 72, is the longtime patriarchal sheriff of a remote town in Wyoming that bears his grandfather's name. Burt Haudesert is a lecherous militiaman and rancher who routinely raped his teenage daughter, Gwen. But Burt's been found dead with a pitchfork through the neck, and Bittersmith, a philanderer and brutish lout, has been called in on his final day in office and on the eve of a blizzard to track down whoever's responsible. Gwen is missing, and suspicion soon falls on Burt's hired farmhand, an orphan named Gail G'Wain who had eyes for Gwen and is also AWOL. Holed up in a farmhouse with Gwen's best friend, Liz Sunday, another victim of rape, the honorable Gail prepares for the assault of vengeful Wyoming militiamen and corrupt local deputies. Lindemuth carefully weaves characters' backstories into this thrilling narrative, and his visceral prose and unsparing tone are wonderfully reminiscent of such modern rural noir masters as Tom Franklin and Donald Ray Pollock. Agent: Cameron McClure, Donald Maass Literary. (Nov.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

revolver with a long barrel. The grips are white and the metal looks like silver bleu cheese or horsehair pottery. I search for a marking that will tell me which box contains the right bullets. CHAPTER ELEVEN Tree roots had lifted the sidewalk panels. Gwen kept her gaze to her feet as she and Liz Sunday walked past the sheriff’s station. Sunlight broke through the leaves and danced like butterflies on the grass and the cement sidewalk. Gwen kicked a bottle cap and watched it bounce over

eight years back. Every state’s got a gang of men with guns and tattered U.S. Constitutions stowed next to their dog-eared John Birch pamphlets. Bitching about government makes men happy, and in recent times, country folk have been fucking euphoric. Rumor was the boys in my neck of the woods were getting rowdy and ready to switch gears from talking to walking. I don’t mind ten men at a hunting camp chucking bottles and blasting away. Any fella dumb enough to get drunk around a crew with guns

leaping to one side and it’s fifty-fifty whether they guess right. Burt and I moved partway in a circle, only five feet apart. “You know there’s a special place in hell for men like you,” I said. He smiled. I swooped to a maple shaft sticking through the snow, the end of a branch cleaned from a limb, but it was frozen to the ground. Burt didn’t move, only grinned, and his eyes worked sideways. “I’m going to leave you for the wild dogs,” he said. “The coyotes.” I bolted into the woods. The

every few minutes an easy breeze came through the hollow and replaced the stink with pine and snow. I watched the moon from when it first appeared between tree limbs, sometimes no more than a flash of silver behind drooping branches dressed in icing, until it rose high into the sky. Sometimes I nodded off, but the dying fire always brought me back because my bare feet got cold until I threw on more wood. Eventually I slipped on my dry socks and toasty, but damp boots, and stretched the aches

the right. I stand beside the window and peer steeply to the ground. Thirty feet from the house, a man hides behind a tree. From the angle of his rifle, he’s the one who shot into the house. Ready to take my life when he doesn’t know what he knows? So self-sure he’s ready to kill? Wrong and all? Why doesn’t he call me out, if he intends to take me into custody? Fuck him. I cross the room, down the hall and slip into the last room. At the window, the angle gives me a clear field to the man’s

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