Mica Highways - Hardcover

Hazelgrove, William Elliott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553106392 ISBN 13: 9780553106398

Publisher: Bantam, 1998

Synopsis

A hypnotic tale of terror and temptation, William Elliott Hazelgrove's Mica Highways is an emotion-packed novel that deftly captures the unique landscape of the American South.  With its fierce vision of love, violence, and redemption, this powerfully haunting work recalls the intensity and passion of To Kill a Mockingbird and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

April 4, 1968.  To the world, it was the day an assassin's bullet struck down Dr.  Martin Luther King Jr.  To Charlie Tidewater, it was the day that life as he knew it was over--the day his beautiful mother suddenly died.

Tamara Drake Tidewater was a descendant of one of Virginia's first families, and Charlie was only nine years old when she passed away.  The newspaper obituary said she died peacefully, but Charlie knows that the obituary was a lie.

Thirty years later, Charlie remains haunted by the mystery surrounding his mother's untimely death.  Newly divorced, he has returned to his childhood home near Richmond, down the glittering mica highways of rural Virginia.  He hopes that discovering how his mother really died will finally enable him to lay the ghosts of his troubled past to rest.  But the one man who can help Charlie has no intention of unveiling horrors he has spent three decades trying to hide.

To unearth the truth about Tamara's death, Charlie must delve into the darkest corners of the Old South, into its twisted secrets and decadent desires.  Shifting seamlessly between Charlie's present-day search for answers and the South's racially charged past, Mica Highways reveals the hidden sins of one small town with a dark history of burning crosses and cold-blooded murder.

A searing fusion of fact and suspense fiction, Mica Highways is as compelling as it is disturbing--a spellbinding and incisive tale from one of today's most gifted storytellers.

About this title

Review:

It's hard to say what the ghost of Ernest Hemingway would think of some of the riper writing in William Elliott Hazelgrove's new psychological thriller; lines such as "Darkness cast shadows on the tangled sheet by his knees, turning his shirt on the chair to dirty linen" might give Hem's shade pause. But Hemingway would probably approve of most of the work being done in his old attic in Oak Park, Illinois, which Hazelgrove has turned into a studio to produce his praised novels Ripples and Tobacco Sticks.

Mica Highways is more conventional in its plotting and ambition than its predecessors, but equally strong on Southern atmosphere and fully imagined characters. Thirty years after his mother's mysterious death in 1968 (on the same day that Martin Luther King was killed), Charlie Tidewater makes a trip back to his boyhood home near Richmond, Virginia, leaving behind in Chicago a failed marriage and an equally unsuccessful career as a stockbroker. He stays with his only surviving relative--Granddaddy, Austin Turin, almost 90, a man who knows everything about cars and quite a lot about how people behave under pressure. Charlie is a dry stick, a standard seeker of truth, but Granddaddy has enough meat and juice and memories in him to keep the story moving to its surprisingly suspenseful conclusion. --Dick Adler

From the Publisher:

Praise for Tobacco Sticks by William Elliott Hazelgrove:

"Hazelgrove captures [the] essence of heartbreak and tragedy beautifully."
--The Denver Post

"American fiction is not dead. Highly recommended."
--Library Journal

"Explosive racial tension, betrayal, and murder...are skillfully entwined in this haunting tale."
--Publishers Weekly

"Hazelgrove has done something with his medium that although reminiscent of Faulkner, is totally his own...more poetry than prose."
--The Georgia Guardian

"A hell of a story."
--The Grand Rapids Press

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0553106392
• ISBN 13: 9780553106398
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336