A Times Best Thrillers of the Year pick. A mythic, propulsive crime saga about the tangled fates of a matriarchal crime family in Maine.
Babs Dionne — proud Franco-American, doting grandmother, vicious crime matriarch — rules her small town of Waterville, Maine with an iron fist. She controls the flow of drugs into Little Canada with the help of her loyal lieutenants (girlfriends since they were teenagers) and her eldest daughter Lori, a Marine veteran struggling with addiction.
When a drug kingpin's numbers go down in the upper northeast, he sends a malevolent force known only as The Man to investigate. At the same time, Babs's youngest daughter has gone missing. In twenty-four hours she will be found dead — and the whole town will seek shelter from Babs's wrath.
Darkly funny, shocking, and unblinking — a crime saga like no other, with a ferocious matriarch at its bruised, beating heart.
Praise
"Bloody yet surprisingly warm-hearted… great stuff." — The Times, Best Thrillers of the Year
"A tour de force." — The Guardian
"Literary thrillers just don't come any better." — Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls
About the author
Ron Currie is the author of the novels God Is Dead, Everything Matters!, and The One-Eyed Man. His work has won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award and the Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been shortlisted for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He lives in Maine — the territory at the heart of this novel.
