Late one night at the end of a scorching summer, a phone call rouses Sheriff Furman Chambers out of bed. Two men have been shot dead on Highway 9 in front of the Hillside Inn, a one-time boardinghouse that is now just a front for Larthan Tull’s liquor business. When Sheriff Chambers arrives to investigate, witnesses say a man named Mary Jane Hopewell walked into the tavern, dragged two of Tull’s runners into the street, and laid them out with a shotgun. Sheriff Chambers’s investigation leads him into the Bell village, where Mary Jane’s family lives a quiet, hardscrabble life of working in the cotton mill. While the weary sheriff digs into the mystery and confronts the county’s underground liquor operation, the whiskey baron himself is looking for vengeance. Mary Jane has gotten in the way of his business, and you don’t do that to Larthan Tull and get away with it. Hailed as a “grand new talent” (Bret Lott) and a “significant new voice in Southern fiction” (Ron Rash), Jon Sealy has written a haunting debut novel. With its unforgettable characters and evocative setting, The Whiskey Baron is a gripping drama about family ties and bad choices, about the folly of power and the limitations of the law.

The Whiskey Baron

Literature & Fiction

Sealy, Jon

Contemporary

Hub City Press

Literary

FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE WHISKEY BARON DRUGS. MONEY. THE CIA. MIAMI 1984. Bobby West is on the edge. As chief financial officer for a Miami holding company and a CIA front, he has overleveraged his business in the go-go 1980s financial culture. He turns to a deal-with-the-devil money laundering operation with a local gangster, Alexander French--a deal which quickly goes south when $3 million goes missing. Now Mr. French, a group of Cuban exiles, and an Israeli smuggler named Adriana Chekhov are all after Bobby West to pay up. With echoes of Iran-Contra and the Orwellian surveillance state, The Edge of America is a stunning thriller about greed, power, and the limits of the American dream.

The Edge of America

United States

Haywire Books

Part Pat Conroy, part Russell Banks, Jon Sealy's THE MERCIFUL is a scathing morality play that explores a cast of small-town characters surrounding a deadly hit and run in coastal South Carolina.The low-country town of Overlook is a sleepy tourist and retirement community known for its golf courses and laid-back lifestyle. But when 19-year-old Samantha James is killed in a hit and run one night while riding her bicycle home from work, the town sets out to crucify the alleged culprit, Daniel Hayward. The headlines tell a compelling story, but the truth is much less clear. As in the film RASHOMON, everyone has a "story" about what happened: the media, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, Daniel, and Samantha's family. As the book examines these myriad perspectives, THE MERCIFUL's stunning scope ranges from characters striving for a kind of American success that's just out of reach, to questions of data analytics, brain emulations, and the very survival of humanity. Ultimately, however, the novel is a morality play that asks tough questions about the nature of justice-and mercy. What do you do when one moment, one accident, one decision changes the course of life forever?In the vein of Russell Banks's THE SWEET HEREAFTER and Celeste Ng's EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU, Jon Sealy's THE MERCIFUL circles around the hit and run and the subsequent trial, providing both a gripping courtroom drama and a probing look at questions of justice and mercy in our era of competing narratives and online outrage.

The Merciful

The King Street Affair

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