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by Steven Wright
A blistering and thrilling debut - a biting exploration of American politics, set in a small South Carolina town, about a political operative running a dark money campaign for his corporate clients.
Dre Ross has one more shot. Despite being a successful political consultant, his aggressive tactics have put him on thin ice with his boss, Mrs. Fitz, who plucked him from juvenile incarceration and mentored his career. She exiles him to the backwoods of South Carolina with $250,000 of dark money to introduce a ballot initiative on behalf of a mining company. The goal: to manipulate the locals into voting to sell their pristine public land to the highest bidder.
Dre arrives in God-fearing, flag-waving Carthage County, with only Mrs. Fitz's well-meaning yet naïve grandson Brendan as his team. Dre, an African-American outsider, can't be the one to collect the signatures needed to get on the ballot. So he hires a blue-collar couple, Tyler Lee and his pious wife, Chalene, to act as the initiative's public face.
Under Dre's cynical direction, a land grab is disguised as a righteous fight for faith and liberty. As lines are crossed and lives ruined, Dre's increasingly cutthroat campaign threatens the very soul of Carthage County and perhaps the last remnants of his own humanity.
A piercing portrait of our fragile democracy and one man's unraveling, The Coyotes of Carthage paints a disturbingly real portrait of the American experiment in action.
"This is an archly comic and ultimately chilling political novel on the effects of the dark money unleashed by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision on the American political soul as well as on the souls of individuals. Thoughtful, sharp-edged fare for the upcoming election year." - Library Journal (starred review)
"That this debut novel is written by an attorney whose specialties include criminal justice and election law adds doleful, acerbic authenticity to his scenario. Yet there is also alertness to the possibility of redemption and change even in the most polarizing of situations." - Kirkus Reviews
"Pungent with dark humor and cynicism, Wright's nuanced portrait shows how the campaign not only pulls apart the town but threatens to drive a wedge between Dre's career ambitions and his humanity. This incisive satire introduces a sharp new voice." - Publishers Weekly
"Wright explores the themes of loyalty, perception versus reality, corruption, and racism, balancing absurd situations and deep-seated issues with wry, self-deprecating humor...A sharply contemporary Faustian tragicomedy with parallels to the TV series Scandal." - Booklist
"With this splendid debut, Steven Wright announces his arrival as a major new voice in the world of political thrillers. I enjoyed it immensely." - John Grisham
"The Coyotes of Carthage is at once timely and timeless, an astonishing and assured debut. Like two-faced Janus, it looks back at where we've been and forward to where we might be going. Steven Wright's novel should be required reading for 2020—or any year in which there's an election at any level." - Laura Lippman
"Steven Wright's Coyotes of Carthage is a novel steeped in atmosphere and laced with menace. It's a political potboiler masking as a buddy drama, a treatise on race and class packaged as a fish-out-of-water tale. Wright's novel is what so few novels are: a page-turner with a conscience, a burner of a read with something to say. If House of Cards and True Detective made a novel, it would be Coyotes of Carthage. It's a great novel and one hell of a debut." - Wiley Cash
This information about The Coyotes of Carthage 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.
Steven Wright is a clinical associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, where he codirects the Wisconsin Innocence Project. From 2007 to 2012 he served as a trial attorney in the Voting Section of the United States Department of Justice. He has written numerous essays about race, criminal justice, and election law for the New York Review of Books.
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