Globe Pequot / Lyons Press
Pages: 256
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Trim: 5½ x 8
978-1-4930-0902-2 • Paperback • March 2015 • $17.95 • (£13.95)
978-1-4930-1682-2 • eBook • March 2015 • $16.99 • (£12.95)
Joseph Heywood is the author of The Snowfly, Covered Waters, The Berkut, Taxi Dancer, The Domino Conspiracy, the nine Grady Service Mysteries, Hard Ground: Woods Cop Stories, and the Lute Bapcat Mysteries Red Jacket and Mountains of the Misbegotten. Featuring Grady Service, a contemporary detective in the Upper Peninsula for Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources, and Lute Bapcat, a Rough Rider turned Michigan game warden in the 1910s, Heywood’s mystery series have earned the author cult status among lovers of the outdoors, law enforcement officials, and mystery devotees. Heywood lives in Portage, Michigan. Visit the author at JosephHeywood.com.
Praise for Joseph Heywood's previous collection of short stories, Hard Ground
“Heywood displays uncommon storytelling versatility in this brilliant collection of 27 tales about the game wardens who patrol Michigan’s Upper Peninsula…. This volume should be read for pleasure, but would do equally well as an instruction manual for aspiring writers.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Joseph Heywood knows his poachers, deer-baiters, and road-beer-drinking yahoos, as well as his cross-dressing informants and Elvis impersonators, but his most compelling characters are the hardworking and embattled conservation officers, the quietly heroic men and women who enforce the law evenhandedly against a well-armed slice of citizenry. Heywood is at his finest and funniest in these short stories from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where cold kills and night can be as ‘black as the inside of a cow.’ These detective stories are a great contribution to the rural American literary tradition, with nods to Mark Twain, Robert Travers, Jim Harrison, Cully Gage, and Dashiell Hammett.”
—Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Once Upon a River and American Salvage, a National Book Award finalist
“Joseph Heywood has a great ear for the vernacular of some of America’s more colorful backwoods ‘citizens,’ the cast for this wild set of tales. Even more incredible is his ability to see into the wild hearts of a wide range of wonderfully flawed human beings and the cops and conservation officers who try to keep them under control. This is full throttle writing, the kind of stuff you can’t put down to pick up the remote. Heywood is a compelling writer who has obviously done his time in the woods and lived to come back to tell us what it’s really like out there.”
—Michael Delp, author of As If We Were Prey and The Last Good Water
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