Tom Franklin – författare

WINNER OF THE CWA GOLD DAGGER AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR.Amos, Mississippi, is a quiet town. Silas Jones is its sole law enforcement officer. The last excitement here was nearly twenty years ago, when a teenage girl disappeared on a date with Larry Ott, Silas's one-time boyhood friend. The law couldn't prove Larry guilty, but Amos' residents have shunned him ever since.Then the town's peace is shattered when someone tries to kill the reclusive Ott, another young woman goes missing, and the town's drug dealer is murdered. Woven through the tautly written mystery is the unspoken secret that hangs over the lives of two men - one black, one white.Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year, is a masterful novel, sizzling with deep Southern menace.

A brilliant debut collection of stories set in the American Deep South, by a distinctive and award-winning new voice.Poachers reads as if Raymond Carver were still alive and living in the profoundly Deep South. Or imagine a world created by Cormac McCarthy and plunk it down in the woods of southern Alabama, where emotions run as raw as moonshine.In ten spare, muscular stories, Tom Franklin evokes a world of forests and swamps, hunting and fishing, and fills it with poachers, drunks and poor white trash. He creates haunting tales about people who react, often violently, against a dying world whose gravity they can’t escape, people like the three half-wild brothers in the award-winning title story, who treat the swamp as their kingdom and hunt down anything that crosses their path – until they themselves become the prey.

From the author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter - winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the YearApril 1927. After months of rain, the Mississippi River has reached dangerous levels and the little town of Hobnob is at threat. Residents fear the levee will either explode under the pressure of the water or be blown by saboteurs from New Orleans, who wish to save their own city. But when an orphaned baby is found the lives of Ingersoll, a blues-playing prohibition agent, and Dixie Clay, a bootlegger who is guarding a terrible secret, collide. They can little imagine how events are about to change them - and the great South - forever. For in the dead of night, after thick, illusory fog, the levee will break . . .

DEVILWOOD opens in 1994, where Wilbur Miller, a veteran cop, has been assigned to the gentler beat of the Alabama Agricultural and Rural Crimes Unit. What begins with him looking for a missing calf amidst rumours of a “painter” (the American word for panther) at large, finds him stumbling upon what seems to be a gruesome crime scene. A bare, mangled foot, covered in blood leads him to discover more blood, everywhere - on the walls, the floor, as far as the eye can see. He is drawn back to events decades prior when several families built an evangelical church under the guidance of a charismatic itinerant preacher, a period of time Miller has been compellingly trying to forget . . .Beautifully told, DEVILWOOD unfolds with growing menace. Franklin is able to conjure the dark and mysterious forces that shape and sometimes violate our lives—which some may call evil—while also being acutely sensitive to the various ways in which people seek grace and, if they’re truly fortunate, occasionally find it.

DEVILWOOD opens in 1994, where Wilbur Miller, a veteran cop, has been assigned to the gentler beat of the Alabama Agricultural and Rural Crimes Unit. What begins with him looking for a missing calf amidst rumours of a “painter” (the American word for panther) at large, finds him stumbling upon what seems to be a gruesome crime scene. A bare, mangled foot, covered in blood leads him to discover more blood, everywhere - on the walls, the floor, as far as the eye can see. He is drawn back to events decades prior when several families built an evangelical church under the guidance of a charismatic itinerant preacher, a period of time Miller has been compellingly trying to forget . . .Beautifully told, DEVILWOOD unfolds with growing menace. Franklin is able to conjure the dark and mysterious forces that shape and sometimes violate our lives—which some may call evil—while also being acutely sensitive to the various ways in which people seek grace and, if they’re truly fortunate, occasionally find it.