Published in The High Desert Advocate January 29, 2021.
New Book Releases
• The first release of the new year is Curtis Bradley Vickers’ debut novel “This Here Is Devil’s Work”. In this unflinching, dramatic adventure, wildland firefighters and cattle rustlers struggle for survival in a changing western landscape. “Curtis Vickers forges unflinchingly into the fiery hearts of his characters and shelters us from the showering sparks produced by their conflagrations. Montana and its people have rarely burned as brightly as they do in this vivid, finely crafted, page-turner of a novel.”
—Siân Griffiths, author of Scrapple, Borrowed Horses, and The Heart Keeps Faulty Time This Here Is Devil’s Work by Curtis Bradley Vickers
“In the powerful New Western novel This Here Is Devil’s Work, emotions propel perceived heroes toward destructive acts.”
—Foreword Reviews
“This Here is Devil’s Work” is a vivid and evocative reminder that, here in the vastness of the American West, our personal stories and the stories of the land remain intertwined and inseparable.”
—Michael P. Branch, author of Rants from the Hill and How to Cuss in Western
“Tautly crafted and breathtakingly suspenseful, this debut novel will leave you forever changed.”
—Christopher Coake, author of You Would Have Told Me Not To
• A big, rollicking, character-filled novel,
“Sunland” is an entertaining and humane view at life on the margins in America today.
“Waters has an eye for physical detail and a charitable heart. These combine to make the borderlands outside Tucson feel real, his multigenerational cast members worth rooting for, and his first novel an easy pill to swallow.”
-The Rumpus
• “The Whole of the Moon” a novel by Brian Rogers: The Whole of the Moon consists of six crisscrossing narratives set along the old Route 66, from the Inland Empire to the terminus just off Sunset Boulevard. The stories span the years from the late 1950s to the present, and the characters are bound by a fact unknown to them: they have each checked out the same public library copy of The Great Gatsby.
An actor sits poolside waiting to hear whether he has been cast in a television pilot. Two kids ditch school in 1964 and go for a hike in the woods that turns dangerous. A woman named Dot remembers her husband who spent years working on a musical adaptation of The Great Gatsby. A young woman Felicity deals with the consequences of an unexpected pregnancy. Mike, a former high school star, attends an open tryout for the California Angels baseball team. And a boarding school teacher tells the story of his cousin, a social climber who has disappeared in the wake of a murder. These are the characters that populate The Whole of the Moon. Brian Rogers’ novel is about determination and failure and life in Southern California away from the red carpet.
“Infused with subtle, evocative details, each story beautifully, quietly beats on against time’s current.”
-Kirkus Reviews
