Esquire's SUmmer Reading List: "The prose is muscular and refreshingly dense..."

BLACKBIRD by Tom Wright, opens with a psychologist being beaten and nailed to a cross on the edge of a southern town. What follows is a bleak yet satisfying mystery in which Detective Jim Bonham unearths the haunting past of the victim, the suspects, and the fraught community that made them who they are. The prose is muscular and refreshingly dense, and the characters are rendered with such complexity that they feel more real than fictional, a quality that makes the novel all the more harrowing.