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Dixie Noir

He wanted redemption.... But could he keep clean in the Dirty South?

When disgraced former Alabama football star Ennis Skinner is released from prison after ten years, all he wants is to make his amends. Earning forgiveness isn’t easy in an unforgiving town like Montgomery, Alabama, however — not in a Southern capital still haunted by its complicated legacy as the birthplace of both the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. Ennis is no sooner reunited with his ailing father — a one-time hero in the Movement — than he is drawn into investigating the disappearance of the daughter of the dead girlfriend responsible for his downfall. As a vulnerable nineteen-year-old incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality, this girl — nicknamed “Dixie” — may just hold the key to mysteries that will determine whether Montgomery will put its past to rest by electing its first-ever African American mayor....

As Ennis’s search for Dixie becomes a quest for personal redemption, he encounters a colorful cast of characters, each with his or her own peculiar ties to Alabama history: High C, the methamphetamine cook-cum-hometown publishing magnate whom Ennis tried to kill a decade earlier; Walk Compson, the “Great Man” of history who returns to the fight for racial equality after a curious period of self-exile; Amory Justice, the incumbent mayor who, with his dirty-tricks loving daughter, Reese — known locally as “the Kudzu Ann Coulter” — will go to any length to stay in power; and, finally, Red, the Zelda Fitzgerald-quoting painter whose body art represents a uniquely alluring effort to exorcise the demons of the South....

At once fast-paced and character driven, Dixie Noir is as sticky and overheated as an August afternoon in the land of cotton.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 291
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781594148217
  • Genres
  • fiction, noir
  • Release date
  • 2009