Swollen Red Sun

July 28, 2014
Set in Missouri's Gasconade County, once labeled the methamphetamine capital of the world, this smoldering tale pits cop against dope dealer/desperate redneck against even more desperate redneck. In this rural area, "White-trash pharmacies run from beaten-down mobile homes at the end of dead-end roads would always trade pills for dope." Deputy Sheriff Dale Everett Banks finds $52,000 in the trailer of meth dealer Jerry Dean Skaggs, and decides to keep it. Jerry Dean needs that money to keep his secret partners happy. The plot spreads out to include more and more county residents, even Butch Pogue in his hilltop compound where he practices a weird religion and keeps his latest "wife" locked in the cellar. You know you're talking authentic hillbilly when the main characters each weigh 300 pounds. Gasconade local McBride (whose previous book was the cult favorite Frank Sinatra in a Blender) gives Breaking Bad fans more down and dirty meth action.

Starred review from July 1, 2014
The author of the outrageous Frank Sinatra in a Blender (2012) returns with an equally blood-spattered but slightly less offbeat thriller. If you see a burned-out house trailer on the cover of a crime novel, you can pretty well count on the book being country noir and the former occupants of the trailer having something to do with cooking or selling meth. Both assumptions hold true here, but that's about all that's predictable in McBride's uncompromisingly gritty but surprisingly tender and quite funny tale of a good cop who impetuously grabs $52,000 of meth money hidden in a long-untended kitty-litter pan on the floor of meth cook Jerry Dean Skaggs' trailer (yes, the one on the cover). Deputy Sheriff Dale Banks spends the rest of the novel trying to get out from under the hailstorm of trouble the money causes him. With the body count rising, both Banks and Dean, who owes the stolen money to a psycho preacher called Reverend Butch Pogue, who happens to be the James Beard of meth cooks, try to set things right, each in their very different, sometimes epically misguided ways. McBride's novel combines the backwoods creepiness of Nic Pizzolatto's HBO series True Detective, the understated country humor of Johnny Shaw's Big Maria (2012), and the sensitivity to character and nuance of Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone (2006).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)