Description
A darkly comic debut novel by an
independent bookseller about an idealistic young farmer who moves his
family to a Mississippi flood basin, suffers financial ruin--and becomes
increasingly paranoid he's being framed for murder.
It all began
with a simple dream. An ambitious young environmental scientist hoped to
establish a sustainable farm on a small patch of river-bottom land
nestled among the Mississippi hills. Jay Mize convinced his wife Sandy
to move their six-year-old son away from town and to a rich and lush
parcel where Jacob could run free and Jay could pursue the dream of a
new and progressive agriculture for the twenty-first century. He did not
know that within a year he'd be ruined, that flood and pestilence would
invade his fledgling farm or that his wife and son would leave him to
pick up the pieces by himself.
When Jay Mize discovers a corpse on
his property, he is sure his bad luck has come to a head and he is being
framed. Were Jay in his right mind, he might have reported the body to
the police at the very same moment they were searching for a missing
tourist from Ohio. He might have not dragged the body back to his farm
under the cover of night and spent hours disposing of it. But Jay Mize
is not in his right mind. His mounting paranoia is accelerated by a
hot-rod local deputy, nosing around with questions about the missing
tourist and making dark comments about Jay's estranged wife Sandy. It's
enough to make an honest man a maniac...
Drawing on elements of
classic Southern noir, dark comedy, and modern dysfunction, Jamie
Kornegay's novel is about the gravitational pull of one man's apocalypse
and the hope that maybe, just maybe, he can be reeled in from the
brink. Readers will "applaud the arrival of an exquisitely deranged new
voice to American fiction" (Jonathan Miles, award-winning author of
"Want Not" and "Dear American Airlines").