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by Derek Nikitas
An Atlanta house-cleaner flees her nowhere life to reunite with the son she gave up for adoption. The teenage boy joins his long-lost mother on an unlawful road trip that proves how much they both have to lose by finding each other. Elsewhere, a deputy must track down the shooter in a drug-related double murder before other investigators discover the deputy’s illicit ties to the case. The killer is an unbalanced college kid hunted by vengeful drug dealers and the police, haunted by loves both dead and for bidden. When the renegade mother and son arrive, past sins and present gambits will ensnare them in the violent endgame between the deputy and the desperate killer.
"Starred Review. Nikitas effectively picks up and drops each thread. Beautifully realized characterizations power complex story lines that meet and connect this disparate group with the inevitability of Greek tragedy." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Nikitas is a master craftsman of both plot and prose, merging gritty, evocative description with sharply drawn characters in a staccato style that includes scenes that end in the middle of a thought." - Library Journal
"An elegantly written second novel (Pyres, 2007) so full of hopelessly lost people that readers should be warned: Depression may ensue." - Kirkus Reviews
"The cautious prose gives the proceedings a literary, if sometimes overwrought, weight, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from dying to know where this brutal road trip will end." - Booklist
This information about The Long Division 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.
Derek Nikitas teaches creative writing at Eastern Kentucky University. Pyres, his first novel, was an Edgar nominee.
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