January 22, 2018
The ferocious fourth novel by the author of Desperation Road confines itself to a few fraught days in the life of a cage fighter on his last legs. Forty-something Jack Boucher, raised by a foster mother in the Mississippi Delta, has reached a crisis point. Subsisting on pain pills washed down with Wild Turkey, he has lost large chunks of his memory, but he knows that his beloved foster mom is dying in a nursing home and that he is on the edge of being killed by loan shark Big Momma Sweet if he doesn't either hand over some cash or take on one last, potentially fatal fight. After a car crash on a back road, Jack’s destiny becomes entwined with that of a troupe of outlaw carnies, among them the thoughtful, tattooed Annette, who can’t “decide if she was putting together pieces to some fateful puzzle or if she had simply fallen into this man’s mess because of her own need.” Vivid descriptions never slow the pace of the plot, which moves swiftly toward an inevitable but still surprising climax. As violent as it is poetic, Smith’s novel draws the reader in from beginning to end.
Starred review from March 15, 2018
Like so many noir heroes, Jack Boucher finds himself forced to take on that archetypal one last job. In 50-year-old, pill-addicted Jack's case, the job is a fight, a return to the cage where, in his youth, he was a bare-knuckle legend. But now Jack owes $12,000 to Big Momma Sweet, who runs the no-holds-barred brawls, along with every other kind of vice in the Mississippi Delta. A good run at the tables had put the money in Jack's pocket, and he was on his way to pay his debt when he ran afoul of the wrong guy and wound up in a ditch with no money and a wrecked truck. So it's back to the cage for Jack, who knows only too well that one more fight is almost certain to be one too many for a man who has already absorbed more than his limit of blows to the head. We've been down this road many times, notably in Brad Smith's One-Eyed Jacks (2000), also about a fighter with a blood vessel ready to burst, but Smith throws in a tantalizing wrinkle by having a carnival boss and his featured attraction, tattooed-lady Annette?both with existential crises of their own?stumble on the money. We know their falling stars will eventually cross with Jack's, but we don't know how. This crisply written tale of thwarted lives and rawboned courage will sit comfortably alongside the similarly hardscrabble work of Daniel Woodrell and Chris Offutt.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)
Starred review from January 15, 2018
This resourceful writer weds violence, despair, and glimmers of hope during a few tense days in the life of a once-legendary bare-knuckle fighter.In a brief prologue, Jack Boucher is abandoned at age 2 and bounces around foster homes before an unmarried woman named Maryann takes him in at age 12. As the main story opens, Jack is 50 and facing nothing but trouble. The bank is about to repossess Maryann's house, and a vicious bookie has sent collectors to squeeze him for gambling debts. It gets worse. After winning $12,000 at a casino, Jack crashes his truck and wanders off in a daze, forgetting the money. The cash then slips into a subplot about a traveling carnival with ex-con roustabouts and a tattooed beauty named Annette. She and the carnie boss find the money, but there are complications, not least her possible ties to Jack. In flashbacks, Smith (Desperation Road, 2017, etc.) reveals the loving bonds Jack forms with Maryann and the thrill he discovers in the bare-knuckle cage, where he soon becomes a star in a bloody demimonde. But too many blows to the head leave him in constant pain and addicted to pills and booze that also cost him his edge in the cage--an edge he may need one last time. Smith could be nodding to the classical unities of place and time, with his three-day plot centered on Clarksdale, Mississippi. Other unifying factors are hard-edged, like the brass knuckles that appear four times in nearly 200 pages, or quasi-mystical, like a hawk that marks both Jack and Annette. These elements are subtly handled, but Smith shows less restraint by letting Jack's pondering of his physical and psychological pain become a litany.A gifted storyteller who parses battered dreams and the legacies of abandonment with a harsh realism that is both saddening and engaging.
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Starred review from February 15, 2018
As a newborn, Jack Boucher was dumped into the foster care system; at the age of 12, he met Maryann, who raised him in a 200-year-old antebellum house in the Mississippi Delta. But when Jack turned 18, he moved out so he could box professionally--against his foster mother's advice. Twenty five years later, Jack is damaged by too many concussions from bare-knuckle fighting and is in debt to the queen of Delta vice, Big Momma Sweet. To cope with the many concussions, he takes illegal painkillers. One night when he is about to pay off his debt to Big Momma Sweet, he crashes his car and the money he owes her is stolen by an unlikely savior, Annette, from the "church of coincidence." Annette attempts to redeem Jack, but Jack must fight one last fight to save Maryann's ancestral home. VERDICT Recipient of the 2014 Mississippi Author Award, Smith (Desperation Road) excels in this dark and violent Southern grit-lit thriller. Fans of James Lee Burke will delight in the strong sense of place in the Deep South, while fans of David Joy will appreciate the protagonist's inner turmoil.--Russell Michalak, Goldey-Beacom Coll. Lib., Wilmington, DE
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