Fateful Mornings (Henry Farrell Series #2)

by Tom Bouman

Overview

A woman's chilling disappearance haunts a rural Pennsylvania county in the eagerly awaited new Henry Farrell mystery from the Edgar Award–winning author of Dry Bones in the Valley.

Tom Bouman’s Dry Bones in the Valley won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The New York Times hailed it as “beautifully written,” and the Washington Post called it a “mesmerizing and often terrifying story.”

In Wild Thyme, Pennsylvania, summer has brought Officer Henry Farrell nothing but trouble. Heroin has arrived with a surge in burglaries and other crime. When local carpenter Kevin O’Keeffe admits that he shot a man and that his girlfriend, Penny, is missing, the search leads the small-town cop to an industrial vice district across state lines that has already ensnared more than one of his neighbors. With the patience of a hunter, Farrell ventures into a world of shadow beyond the fields and forests of home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393249644
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/27/2017
Series:	Henry Farrell Series , #2
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Tom Bouman is the author of The Bramble and the Rose, Fateful Mornings and Dry Bones in the Valley, which won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lives in upstate New York.

Editorial Reviews

04/10/2017
Officer Henry Farrell, the affable lone lawman of rural Wild Thyme Township, Pa., has a flair for stirring up trouble, as shown in Edgar-winner Bouman’s atmospheric sequel to 2014’s Dry Bones in the Valley. When waiflike heroin addict Penny Pellings disappears near Maiden’s Grove Lake, Henry’s gut tells him that the most obvious suspect—Penny’s alcoholic partner Kevin O’Keeffe—didn’t abduct her. Soon after drug dealer Charles Michael Heffernan’s corpse surfaces in the Susquehanna River, undercover sleuthing in nearby Binghamton, N.Y., nearly lands Henry behind bars himself, and a car crash springs Heffernan’s kidnapped companion, Vicki Jelinski, from the vehicle’s trunk. As Henry continues to push for information from a plethora of local dirtbags at increasing personal risk, life continues to unspool for the young widower in this scenic but economically depressed patch: playing his fiddle with friends, hunting, moonlighting construction, occasionally hooking up. With time, too, answers gradually emerge. But they prove less compelling than the novel’s poetic, pitch-perfect sense of place. Agent: Neil Olson, Donadio & Olson. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"A terrific writer. Definitely one to keep an eye on."

Dennis Lehane

"[A] vivid visit to a depressed region."

New York

"Leisurely but hard-edged… Officer Farrell, who thinks a lot but speaks so little… proves to be excellent company."

Wall Street Journal - Tom Nolan

"What makes this book—all of Bouman’s writing—so memorable, beyond the cunning plot and painful portrait of this ‘Rust Belt’ region, is the emotion invested in each scene....[I]rrestible characters make this book a compelling read."

Kingdom Books

"You would be hard-pressed to find a finer new series than Tom Bouman’s Henry Farrell novels because of the complexity of the plots or the richness of the characters, but what it really comes down to is just damn good writing."

Craig Johnson

"Rich and satisfying… [A] relentless thriller that reads like a literary novel."

Michael Sims

"Fateful Mornings is a haunting dissection of the broken heart of America."

Val McDermid

"Henry Farrell casts an eye both dry and weary. What he sees is a people no less troubled than their rust-belt landscape: drug addicts and drug dealers, drunks and grifters. In Wild Thyme, vice and virtue seem locked in an epic bar brawl of astonishingly high stakes, where the losers keep their money and the winners keep their souls."

Thomas H. Cook

04/01/2017
When troubled local carpenter Kevin O'Keefe reports that his girlfriend Penny is missing and that he may have shot someone, Officer Henry Farrell is pulled into an extensive investigation involving a multistate vice ring and a shadowy, murderous hit man. Over many fateful mornings long-held secrets are unraveled, and political, cultural, and environmental realities continue to impact the Rust Belt town of Wild Thyme, PA. Meanwhile, widowed Henry's long-ended affair with married Shelly Bray threatens to derail his personal and professional life as he begins a relationship with Miss Julie Meagher. VERDICT In this follow-up to the Edgar Award-winning Dry Bones in the Valley, character and sense of place remain paramount. Bouman's evocative language draws readers into Henry's world, appealing to fans of rural noir/grit lit and Julia Keller, Wiley Cash, and John W. Billheimer. [See Prepub Alert, 11/14/16.]—ACT

Library Journal

"Fateful Mornings is terrific reading, a keeper that you’ll want to read at least twice and maybe even more frequently. You’ll wish that everything was this good."

Book Reporter - Joe Hartlaub

"Fateful Mornings unfolds in a less hectic and more novelistic manner than many police-procedurals, leaving space for meditations on natural history… investigatory digressions and dead ends, lucky chances, and the vicissitudes of the lonely narrator’s love-life.… Officer Farrell… proves to be excellent company."

Wall Street Journal

"An uncommonly intelligent whodunit, haunted by the presence of an unforgettable villain who slinks through the pages with the lubricious evil of Cape Fear’s Max Cady. With meditations on folk music, ornithology, and the art of timber-framing, Fateful Mornings is the kind of novel that feels more like a porch-sitting conversation with an old friend. Tom Bouman is my new favorite mystery writer."

Nickolas Butler

"My father always said that you can judge people by the way they keep their tools: clean and sharp or soiled and soft. Tom Bouman’s tools—the words he uses to make Fateful Mornings—cut straight and true, in this riveting mystery about a good man caught in the ruined Eden of rural America."

Julia Keller

"Fateful Mornings is that long sought-after gem, the place where the literary meets the crime novel in beautiful symmetry. Henry Farrell is an existential everyman, as clueless as the rest of us about life’s meaning, and his so very human stumbling in search of the elusive truths is one of the many beauties of this fine novel."

William Kent Krueger

"More than a mystery, Fateful Mornings is a portrait of the rusted pocket of northeastern Pennsylvania that Henry Farrell calls home. Bouman’s tender portrait of a widower remaking his life infuses his crime fiction with a level of intimacy that is both rare and winning. I was happy to ride shotgun with Henry Farrell again."

Attica Locke