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Book Reviewed by:Holy City is the captivating debut from Henry Wise about a deputy sheriff who must work alongside an unpredictable private detective after he finds himself on the outs from his sheriff's department over his unwillingness to look the other way when an innocent man is arrested for murder.
After a decade of exile precipitated by the tragic death of his mother, Will Seems returns home from Richmond to rural Southern Virginia, taking a job as deputy sheriff in a landscape given way to crime and defeat. Impoverished and abandoned, this remote land of tobacco plantations, razed forests, and boarded-up homes seems stuck in the past in a state that is trying to forget its complex history and move on.
Will's efforts to go about his life are wrecked when a mysterious, brutal homicide claims the life of an old friend, Tom Janders, forcing Will to face the true impetus for his return: not to honor his mother's memory, but to pay a debt to a Black friend who, in an act of selfless courage years ago, protected Will and suffered permanent disfigurement for it.
Meanwhile, a man Will knows to be innocent is arrested for Tom's murder, and despite Will's pleas, his boss seems all too content to wrap up the case and move on. Will must weigh his personal guilt against his public duty when the local Black community hires Bennico Watts, an unpredictable private detective from Richmond, to help him find the real killer. It would seem an ideal pairing—she has experience, along with plenty of sand, and Will is privy to the details of the case—but it doesn't take long for either to realize they much prefer to operate alone.
Bennico and Will clash as they each defend their untraditional ways on a wild ride that wends deep into the Snakefoot, an underworld wilderness that for hundreds of years has functioned as a hideout for outcasts—the forgotten and neglected and abused—leaving us enmeshed in the tangled history of a region and its people that leaves no one innocent, no one free, nothing sacred.
Excerpt
Holy City
FIRE WAS THE DREAM that broke him.
He sat stiff as a dead cat, felt for the handle of his pistol under the seat, relaxed. The sad night came back to him, one of many like it, riding indefinitely, listening to the angry word of God through a thin static distance, the voice somehow both austere and intimate, seeming to speak directly to him with piercing certainty.
He listened because there was nothing else out here—no other radio station—between hamlets or villages or four-way intersections, some of which at one point probably had been towns, nothing to see between them but a country undulating in pursuit of some sort of equilibrium, a pulse one could assess only by covering its distances, surprising because the countryside felt dead otherwise. It was not the soft, green junglelike vegetation of so much of Virginia but a hard, coarse, spiky land. The lonely roads wended like snakes through close forest or open fields or woods felled entirely for their lumber, ...
What makes Holy City unique for its anodyne "mystery" appellation is its evocation of a Southern town gone to seed, mirroring declining industries, crime, and poverty. Wise's vision is a hopeful one, and themes of faith and forgiveness are redolent throughout, as Will continues to hope that the past does not have to control the future, especially in the heart of the ex-Confederacy. Using multiple POVs from a colorful assortment of characters, Wise captures a range of diverse insights that illuminate the tangled relationships among Southside's residents. And as Will and Bennico get closer to uncovering the shocking truth of Tom's death— and his killer—readers will race to the finish, if only to find a light in the dark narrative that includes instances of profoundly disturbing violence...continued
Full Review
(836 words)
(Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski).
Ace Atkins, author of The Heathens
Holy City is a hell of an impressive debut by a great new voice in crime fiction. Henry Wise balances a bold literary voice with authentic storytelling in the kind of gritty Southern thriller that's right down my alley. From page one, you'll be absolutely hooked into this evocative world. Megan Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of The Turnout
Henry Wise's striking debut Holy City is a haunting story of crime and the myriad ways that one can be punished. Set deep in the rural expanse of southern Virginia, it's both a thriller and a dark fairy tale, filled with danger and menace, loss and longed-for redemption. S.A. Cosby, author of All the Sinners Bleed
Holy City is an amazing piece of work. A Southern novel that examines the pathos and ethos of small-town life and the weight of both grief and hatred. Love it.
The area where author Henry Wise's Holy City takes place—Southside—encompasses a swath of counties in the southern portion of Virginia's Piedmont region. Southside stretches from the James River south to the North Carolina border and extends as far east as Isle of Wight and Southampton Counties, bounded along the western edge by the foothills of the Blue Ridge.
Its history is rich in landmark events. In the nineteenth century, Southside comprised counties with some of Virginia's largest enslaved populations, and the region was the setting of two of the most dramatic episodes of the Civil War: Ulysses S. Grant's siege of Petersburg, Virginia, in 1865, led to Robert E. Lee's eventual retreat from the city on April 2 and his...
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