Crimespree magazine, in conjunction with Friday Reads Facebook page, is offering you a chance to win a copy of CRY FATHER BY BENJAMIN WHITMER
In the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and Larry Brown comes a haunting story about men, their fathers, their sons, and the legacy of violence.
For Patterson Wells, disaster is the norm. Working alongside dangerous, desperate, itinerant men as a tree clearer in disaster zones, he’s still dealing with the loss of his young son. Writing letters to the boy offers some solace. The bottle gives more.
Upon a return trip to Colorado, Patterson stops to go fishing with an old acquaintance, only to find him in a meth-induced delirium and keeping a woman tied up in the bathtub. In the ensuing chain of events, which will test not only his future but his past, Patterson tries to do the right thing. Still, in the lives of those he knows, violence and justice have made of each other strange, intoxicating bedfellows.
Hailed as “the next great American writer” (Frank Bill, author of Crimes in Southern Indiana), Benjamin Whitmer has crafted a literary triumph that is by turns harrowing, darkly comic, and wise.
About the author: I was born and raised on back-to-the-land communes and counterculture enclaves ranging from Southern Ohio to Upstate New York. One of my earliest and happiest memories is of standing by the side of a country road with my mother, hitchhiking to parts unknown. Since then, I’ve been a factory grunt, a vacuum salesman, a convalescent, a high-school dropout, a graduate student, a semi-truck loader, an activist, a kitchen-table gunsmith, a squatter, a college professor, a dishwasher, a technical writer and a petty thief.My first novel, Pike, was published in America in 2010 by PM Press, and in France in 2012 by Éditions Gallmeister. Satan is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers, a memoir co-written with country music legend Charlie Louvin, was released by Igniter Books in 2012. My second novel, Cry Father, was published in 2014 by Gallery Books in the US, and in 2015 by Éditions Gallmeister in France.
I live with my two children in Colorado, where I spend most of my free time trolling local histories and haunting the bookshops, tobacconists and firing ranges of ungentrified Denver.
To be entered in the drawing shoot an email over to Jon?@crimespreemag.com (remove the question mark) And put CONTEST in the subject line. Also please put your address in the body of the email.
We will pick the winners on May 15th.
