Bøger af Sterling Watson

"A taut thriller set in Florida's desolate panhandle, part coming-of-age story, all hard-boiled noir. Eighteen-year-old Travis Hollister is always the stranger who comes to town. As a twelve-year-old escaping a disordered and unhappy home and parents who loved hard but couldn't make it work, Travis left the Midwest to spend a summer with his grandparents in the Deep South. There he met Delia, the love of his life, who, tragically, was beyond his reach for two reasons-she was his aunt and she was sixteen years old. That summer made Travis guilty of crimes discovered and undiscovered. For his public wrongs, he did time, six years in a Nebraska reform school. For his undiscovered wrongs, he suffers mightily and wants desperately to be shriven. Can he achieve redemption or is he bound for the hell on earth he can imagine all too well? Driven by his need to rejoin the human community, he becomes the stranger who arrives in Panama City, Florida, searching for Delia, the aunt who was the idol of his twelve-year-old passion. Who is she now? What have the years done to her? Will she welcome the return of Travis or fear it? What will she do about the return of the stranger she once held to her teenage heart"--

When Corey Darrow's body was dragged from the canal where she had drowned in her truck, her hand was still clutching a cocked .357 Magnum. She had come to Eddie for help, a black Irish beauty who was being harassed for raising the ecological flag in the rich dark ooze of Okee County-land of sugarcane, migrant worker, neo-colonialists, and rattle snakes as big a your thigh. A botanist had disappeared after making enquiries at Corey's water management office. Corey asked too many questions of the wrong people, the menacing phone calls began, and she suspected she was being followed. Running on regret for not sensing a serious threat, Eddie Priest drove to Okee City to check out how she had died.He was downing Wild Turkey in the Cane Cutter Bar when Corey's double walked in-Sawnie Darrow, a senior aid to the governor. She had the same million dollar voice as her sister, and a dangerous taste for the truth. She didn't care about Eddie's wife, searching for her center in California, or his vaunted football fame. She wanted him to find out if her sister was murdered. This time Eddie couldn't say no.With the help of insurance investigator Raymer Harney, Eddie was heading into a tangle of vested interests, furtive passions, greed, and unleashed mania that could trap the most ingenious hunter. The truth about Corey's death-and the dirty secrets behind it-might be rotting under a rock too deadly to kick over.Of Sterling Watson's Deadly Sweet, Carl Hiaasen said, "It takes a fine writer to get a grip on such a mad place, and Watson does it. His best characters are mangy, menacing, and too true to life. I see them daily on Highway One, and keep a safe distance." Welcome to Sterling Watson's tour de force.

Professor Tom Stall's career and life are threatened when a nefarious government-affiliated group of men begin investigating the private acts of innocent people in late 1950s Florida.

The Calling is the story of Blackford "Toad" Turlow, an ambitious, impressionable young man who aspires to be a writer. The voice in his head is that of Eldon Odom, a famous - sometimes infamous - novelist to whom Toad apprentices himself. In the beginning, Toad devours every morsel from Odom, both words and actions. But along the way he learns far more than the art of crafting fiction. He discovers that behind Odom's genius is a warped human being who abuses himself and those around him with alcohol, drugs and debauchery. Instead of teaching his eager disciples about writing, Odom uses them to fulfill his base desires. But Toad listens carefully to "The Old Man," the writer who years before was Odom's own mentor and who describes himself as "just the strange boy who cared to write things down." Toad is also influenced by the echoes o f his reckless, lovable dead sister, Trish; Odom's lean and lusty girlfriend, Lindy Briggs; Odom's loving and patient wife, Miss Sully; and by Toad's own girlfriend, the knowing Ardis Baines From this boozy, brilliant cast of characters, Toad eventually learns that a man and his art are two different things, that the worth of one may far exceed the other, and that there are dangerously thin lines between creativity and madness, between dedication and obsession. The Calling is beautifully written and thoroughly engrossing novel of passion and purpose - one that tells much about the calling and the called. "The characters ...are vividly realized, resistant to stereotypes. And the story's three female leads - Ardis, Toad's sometime girlfriend; Missy Sully, Odom's wife; and Lindy, Odom's current mistress - are complex individuals who play out their expected roles in unexpected fashion," said Nancy Pate in her review for the Orlando Sentinel. And, the Winston Salem Journal wrote, "Watson has much to say about life and art, about creativity and obsession, about the danger of violating reasonable bounds. He says it very well."

For Merelene Durham it's been fifteen years of coping, of determination not to lose her purchase on this world: a world that has become almost unendurable since her rakish husband, Mayfield, fled after encephalitis turned their son Roland's mind into a strange, shell-holed country. Blind Tongues is the story of what happens when Mayfield unexpectedly returns, and his conviction that a newly made fortune can make Roland whole again, of a brilliant local attorney whose body bears the scars of aviation heroics in World War II, and finally of Merelene herself, who must choose between these two competitors in love while trying to accept the sweet simplicity of her ageless son. Sterling Watson, author of The Calling and Fighting in the Shade, has created a stunning evocation of a Florida coast town and of the people struggling for love and solace within its borders.

A haunting Florida-based literary thriller in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock.

"The story of what it means to be a man in our culture is an important, vital narrative and it has found one of its best chroniclers in Sterling Watson. This is a powerful, beautifully written book about attitudes and practices that we want to believe are safely in the past. Instead, as Watson reminds us, corruption and cruelty survive through their uncanny ability to take on new shapes."--Laura Lippman, author of I'd Know You Anywhere"Sterling Watson's Fighting in the Shade is an unflinching novel about loyalty and manhood. Like Pat Conroy's The Lords of Discipline, it is simply unforgettable."--Ann Hood, author of The Red Thread"Sterling Watson's polished prose carries this coming-of-age story smoothly from the enthralling to the unsettling, from the poignant to the disturbing, leaving the reader in emotional knots. An uncompromising look at sports, secrets, sexuality, and the South that makes a commentary on relationships ranging from personal to universal."--Michael Koryta, author of The Cypress House