Blood Stained Kings

Like the swamplands of its Southern setting, this noir thriller pulls the reader irresistibly into its thick, suffocating darkness. Willocks, a British psychiatrist who set his first novel, Green River Rising, inside a Texas prison, explores another quintessentially grim American locale, a Southern landscape that stretches from New Orleans to the backwoods of Georgia. It is here that Lenna Parillaud, a deranged former belle who has imprisoned her husband on their decaying plantation for the last 13 years, crosses paths with Gene Grimes, a dissipated physician with skeletons in his closet. The catalyst for their collision is mutual acquaintance Clarence Jefference, a corrupt cop whose reported death sends them scrambling to find the files where he kept dirt on everyone he knew. Before the novel's bloody climax, they are joined by Gene's cold-blooded but lovable dad, Lenna's illegitimate daughter, Ella, and her vengeful husband, whose escape sets off the chain reaction of betrayal, murder and depravity that energizes the plot. Willocks jettisons much of the intellectual baggage that encumbered Green River Rising (1993) and finds a perfect balance in his narrative between philosophical reflection and physical action. His hardscrabble characters are perhaps a little too fond of quoting great works of literature, but their familiarity with Aristotle and the Bible amplifies the plot's overtones of classic tragedy. Violent, literate and unashamed of its grotesque depictions of human evil, this is one of the most entertaining hard-boiled crime novels since James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential. 50,000 first printing; major ad/promo. (Feb.) FYI: Publication will coincide with the release of the film Swept from the Sea, which Willocks scripted and co-produced.