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A John Q Mystery
by JM Gulvin
What starts out as a single line of inquiry becomes a desperate race to find a killer who has a secret as dark and tragic as any cop is ever going to uncover.
With a gun on each hip and godson to the Ranger that took down Bonnie and Clyde, 36-year-old John Quarrie is Old School West with old west values, the very embodiment of the "One Riot - One Ranger" epithet. It's 1967, and, with students across the state protesting the Vietnam War, the Texas Rangers are stretched pretty thin.
A single father, Quarrie lives on a ranch in the Texas panhandle. Grabbling for catfish at the site of a train wreck on Memorial Day, he and his son come across the skull of a young boy. At first, the discovery seems to have no bearing on the suicide of a fellow war vet that John Q is called on to investigate.
"Gulvin's narrative has a distinctly cinematic feel, and his setting - the windswept plains and desolate highways of Texas - lends an eeriness that lingers throughout. The final twist is a doozy, and the devil is in the story's cleverly seeded details." - Publisher's Weekly
"Gulvin tells the story in terse noir prose salted with odd but effective inversions - 'almost absently he seemed to stare' - and takes his time approaching the startling revelations in the finale. A challenging but rewarding read." - Booklist
"The detail is unerring ... and this magisterial grasp of time and place lends the story vivid veracity. The characters leap off the page and the plotting is faultless." - John Boorman, Director of Point Blank and Deliverance
This information about The Long Count was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
JM Gulvin divides his time between Wales and the western United States. He is the author of many previous novels, as well as Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman's bestselling travel book Long Way Down. The Long Count is his first John Q mystery. He is married and has two daughters.
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