When last we checked on author Daniel Friedman’s character Buck Schatz, we were hoping the long-retired Memphis police detective would make it to his next decade — in spite of his medical issues, miserable outlook, and unwavering commitment to Lucky Strikes. Fortunately for fans of memorable mysteries, Friedman has delivered the third book in the series, which, given that Schatz is now nearly 90, is aptly titled Running Out of Road.
As evidenced by the travels depicted her most recent memoir, Year of the Monkey, Patti Smith has embodied the nomadic spirit of the public troubadour for decades. Whether she’s performing riotous sets with her band or working side by side with literary lights, Smith has forged a role in our arts culture unlike any other.
“It was a bitch growing up in Birmingham. Unless you were white. And Earl B. Peterson wasn’t white,” writes Maryville author Rhonda Lynn Rucker in her young adult novel, Welcome to Bombingham. Rucker shines a spotlight on the systemic racism and unchecked violence that plagued the black community in early 1960s Birmingham, Alabama.
In James McBride’s Deacon King Kong, a hard-drinking, hallucinating Baptist deacon known as Sportcoat shoots the ear off a notorious drug dealer in broad daylight, and an aging cop and an Italian mobster try to save Sportcoat from meeting his end in the housing projects of Red Hook Brooklyn.
Drawn from her own family history, Louise Erdrich’s stirring new novel, The Night Watchman, unfolds around dedicated Chippewa tribal councilman Thomas Wazhushk, who enlists the help of many in his community to fight encroaching legal threat to their tribe’s survival.
A valley covered in kudzu conceals a town’s dark secrets in Michael Farris Smith’s fifth novel, Blackwood. After two strangers arrive, unimaginable horrors begin to creep from the shadows. Smith will discuss Blackwood at Novel in Memphis on March 11.
