A fantastic tale of identity, crime, and the long tail of violence

Your ancestors breathe through you. Sometimes, they call for vengeance.

Babs Dionne, proud Franco-American, doting grandmother, and 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 vet struggling with addiction.

When a drug kingpin discovers that his numbers are 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, Sis, has gone missing, which doesn’t seem at all like a coincidence. In twenty-four hours, Sis will be found dead, and the whole town will seek shelter from Babs’s wrath.

This is the first novel by Ron Currie that I’ve read. It is at once the story of the Dionne family, and simultaneously an examination of the long tail of violence that can change individuals and communities. Currie’s prose quickly hooked me, and the story kept me reading well into the night. This is a really, really good novel. Continue reading →