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Starred review from February 11, 2019
In Thriller Award winner Panowich’s excellent sequel to 2015’s Bull Mountain, the death of the brothers of County Sheriff Clayton Burroughs has left a void in the family business, which includes the production and distribution of meth and moonshine in northern Georgia. Outside criminal elements are looking to expand into this area. Burroughs has vowed to keep the rule of law, but when his wife and newborn son are threatened, he’s forced to choose between keeping his family safe or embracing his outlaw roots and taking over as the heir apparent of the region’s most ruthless crime family. He must also examine personal issues long buried under alcohol and avoidance. Although the stark economic backdrop of rural Georgia and a cast of richly described characters fuel the narrative, it’s the emotional complexity of Burroughs (“He hoarded guilt and pain the way some people did magazines and newspapers”) as well as the brass knuckle punch of an ending that will have readers applauding. This is hillbilly noir at its finest. 75,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Assoc.

February 15, 2019
Panowich's follow-up to Bull Mountain (2015) is a story of buried lucre and hidden feelings.For his sophomore effort, Panowich has written a violent, gruesome, sharply focused tale. The drug dealing Leek clan, from Florida, faces off with troubled Sheriff Clayton Burroughs of Bull Mountain, Georgia. The Leek crew wants to move stolen OxyContin from Florida through Georgia to Tennessee and North Carolina. They ask Burroughs to offer safe passage through the mountains where he officiates. But even if Clayton's family has its own history of drug-dealing, he draws the line at going along with the Leeks' scheme. The Leeks, meanwhile, want even more from the Burroughses: Somewhere on Bull Mountain the sheriff's family stashed millions of their ill-gotten dollars. The two plotlines tether the reader even if the action sometimes plays out in too-familiar moments: The sheriff's baby is imperiled in a burning house, after which thugs brutalize his wife. Panowich compensates for the melodramatics with dimensional characters, punchy dialogue, and a palpable sense of place. Clayton Burroughs is a psychologically and physically wounded man struggling to deal with shooting to death his drug-dealing brother. The sheriff's relationship with his wife, Kate, is troubled, an inarticulate conflict his drinking riles. Backing the couple is a slate of characters who display chilling capabilities for good and evil deeds. After confessing to murder and ordering the burning of Clayton's father's barn, a woman gives the sheriff's infant son a blanket she crafted. Panowich salts his tale with evocative detail, like the jars of vienna sausages, the Dinty Moore Potted Meat, and the Zippo-type lighters bearing Confederate flags for sale at Pollard's Corner Gas 'n Go. Off-putting, though, is the author's penchant for using the four-letter vulgarity for excrement, which turns up on page after page. He can do better, as he otherwise shows.Action and reflection are skillfully balanced in a vigorously written, trenchant tale.

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March 1, 2019
At least since Mario Puzo, crime writers have liked to treat criminal families as mirrors of the conventional variety. So it is with Panowich's wonderfully written chronicles of the Georgia-based Burroughs clan. They're all here: cranky in-laws, difficult kids, a brother who's an insufferable good example. Clayton Burroughs, who's mortified his pack of meth-heads by becoming sheriff, must fight off the efforts of a cartel seeking to turn his turf into an "opiate highway" between Florida and the north. It's the clashes between these factions rather than the family tiffs, which go on too long, that spark the best scenes. There's a riveting shoot-out in a country tavern that happens to be, against type, a gay bar. And there's Vanessa, a blonde vamp out of pulp heaven, who turns out to be named Bessie Mae and wears a wig. And there are plenty of other vivid action scenes, like a cruel attack on Clayton and his family that goes on for more than 30 pages. Panowich is a terrific storyteller with a way with words. Clayton's mountain, he muses, is "a wheel of tragedy that never stops rolling." Fine country noir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

November 1, 2018

Introduced in Panowich's acclaimed debut, Bull Mountain--winner of Pat Conroy and International Thriller Writers awards--Georgia sheriff Clayton Burroughs here finds himself tangled up with Bull Mountain's most dangerous criminal family, which happens to be his own. He's still recovering from being shot in a fight that killed his two brothers--and left a power vacuum in the local underworld that is forcing him to choose between the family and the law. Big promotion.

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