by Joe R. Lansdale
From Casual Debris.Eleven year-old Harry Crane and his little sister Thomasina "Tom" stumble upon the mutilated corpse of a black woman along the Sabine River in East Texas, 1933. The boy's farmer father, Jacob Crane, acts as the community's lawman, and through the boy's perspective we are brought i...
Pretty solidly written mystery set in Depression-era East Texas river bottom country with all the troubling racial and social baggage that involves. Surprisingly I figured out whodunit (I'm usually clueless) and the denouement, especially where the character Tom was involved felt rushed, so 3 1/2 st...
Lansdale plops you right in the middle of the East Texas bayou and runs you along with the protagonist as he tells his enthralling story.
This is Lansdale at his best. The Bottoms is a realistic look at rural life in the East Texas during the Great Depression. Narrated by a man at the end of his years about an incident that happened he was 11 years old, the story centers around a string of brutal murders of women. At first it is a bla...