Buried Secrets

Dead Man Blues, a crime novel by S.D. House (pen name of bestselling author Silas House), combines a nail-biting whodunit with the tale a man in search of redemption. Set in 1955 in a small town on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, this mystery balances finely tuned twists with a balanced cast of heroes and villains.

At the book’s start, protagonist Dave Hendricks has hit rock bottom. After his wife left him for his best friend, Sheriff Victor Burns, Dave drove his car into the courthouse and lost his job as mayor. Now living with his dog on a pontoon boat, Dave, a former detective and World War II veteran, is trying to rebuild his tattered reputation when one night he happens upon the scene of a murder. This sets into motion a series of events that will change the course of Dave’s life.

Knowing there’s no one better than Dave at solving crimes, Victor turns to him to help solve this case: one grisly murder that turns into two by the following day. As the former friends awkwardly team up to find the killer, Dave reconnects with another friend from childhood, Nina, who has moved back to work as a reporter at the local newspaper. From the evening of their first reunion, Dave senses that “there was something this woman was hiding.” In spite of the pair’s chemistry, that uneasy feeling doesn’t go away.

In addition to these three main characters, the novel is filled with a colorful cast of locals, including suspects. As Dave digs deeper, he discovers long-buried secrets about almost everyone in town.

Former Kentucky poet laureate House is a fine storyteller with a poet’s sensibility. This novel, his first published under pen name S.D. House, marks a foray into commercial crime writing, yet his love of language shines in these pages. In this fictitious Southern town, people rarely just “walk.” Instead, by turns, they “sashay,” “waddle,” “zoom,” “paw,” “stalk,” “spin on their heels,” “stomp,” “zip,” “lurk,” “hoof,” “shuttle,” “saunter,” “rustle,” “rush,” “stroll,” “hunker,” “slide,” “crash,” and “plant.”

Dead Man Blues is notable for its readable mix of high- and low-brow details, the South’s ongoing reckoning with remnants from the Civil War, and a searing investigation (“old-fashioned detective work”) fueled by taut relationships between its layered, dynamic, and utterly human characters.