The Midnight Cool

October 17, 2016
In this satisfying debut novel, Billy Monday, an Irish immigrant, and Charles McLaughlin, his young, orphaned accomplice, are small-time con artists who end up in Richfield, Tenn. The year is 1916 and war fever is mounting in the U.S. The two begin buying and selling mules to be used by the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, but they are themselves taken when they buy a mare from local bigwig Leland Hatcher that turns out to be a killer. Further complicating matters is Hatcher’s daughter, Catherine, with whom Charles promptly falls in love, finding himself out of his depth in her elite social world. Footloose Charles decides to buy some land and put down roots in Richfield, hoping to impress Catherine and her father. These chapters are interspersed with flashbacks of new immigrant Billy’s relationship with a young woman named Maura. America’s entry into World War I and Charles’s relationship with Catherine impel the young man to make a fateful decision that will have consequences for all concerned. Reading like a cross between Faulkner’s “Spotted Horses” and Fitzgerald’s “The Last of the Belles,” this novel is filled with nearly melodramatic situations that are rescued by the intelligence of the writing and the acuity of the characterizations, on the way to its bittersweet denouement.

November 1, 2016
In this colorful down-home drama, two young drifters stop for a time in Tennessee of a century ago, where they trade in mules and learn of local secrets amid the small-town ferment of the U.S. entering World War I. Billy and Charles find themselves lingering in Richfield, Tennessee, after a local parvenu tricks them into buying The Midnight Cool, a beautiful mare with a murderous temperament. Charles soon has a good job trading in mules being sent overseas for British troops. He also has fallen for the parvenu's daughter, Catherine, and must set himself up as worthy of her. Billy, somewhat sidelined, gets a back story in brief, eloquent chapters that interrupt the main narrative. In fact, Peelle (Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, 2009, etc.) seems torn between her two male leads. While Charles carries the main plot and themes (star-crossed love, patriotism, profit versus honesty, and dark family histories), he's a bit dense and melodramatic. Billy is more likable. He has the best lines, the wit to grasp any situation quickly, and the grit to endure physical pain and the emotional wounds of one bad choice. Such choices and their consequences can seem to stand like billboards in the story--along with lines that seem scripted for a Clint Eastwood parody, like: "A mule's got nothing but his own life to prove himself by." Charles and Catherine face one such choice after their first night of sex. Her father's affair with a black servant brings on more than one and sets up the book's cruelest scene. Charles has another tough one when some of the mules in a big shipment come down with a fatal infectious disease. Peelle isn't subtle with these message moments, but she's a natural storyteller with a fine sense of town life and characters and of a time when maybe irony couldn't tarnish words like "duty."

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December 15, 2016
In Whiting Awardwinner Peelle's (Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, 2009) richly textured first novel, itinerant grifters Charles and Billy are stuck in Richfield, Tennessee, after an ill-advised purchase leaves them saddled with a killer mare named Midnight Cool. When Billy is seriously injured attempting to tame the wild, previously abused horse, Charles discovers a suddenly lucrative business, procuring mules to be sent to Europe as the U.S. enters WWI. Charles, the fast-talking, quick-witted, orphaned son of a prostitute, soon finds himself socializing with Richfield's elite and falling madly in love with Catherine, the rebellious daughter of the town's richest and possibly cruelest resident. Peelle artfully navigates the subtle distinctions that separate man and beast, often leaving one to wonder which is which. The skillfully crafted characters are rendered with acute psychological insight into the moral dilemmas that shape one's humanity and sense of right and wrong. The propulsive narrative, fueled by poetic prose, is made more powerful by the heart-wrenching, quietly heroic lives eked out in the margins of history. For fans of Mary Gaitskill and Ron Rash.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)