Winter in the Heart (The Hemlock County Novels) - Softcover

Poyer, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1937997464 ISBN 13: 9781937997465

Publisher: Northampton House, 2014

Synopsis

"Dark and gritty as a gravel road." - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review “A searing novel of corporate corruption and justice denied.” – Jay Parini “A wonderfully affirmative novel written with grace, style, and verve.” – Florida Times-Union “A novel of astonishing depth and power.” – Jack Anderson “A courtroom thriller with vividly imagined and deftly rendered characters.” – Publishers Weekly Reclusive hermit and ex-hunter W. T. Halvorsen is a scapegoat for the crimes of the rich and the powerful in remote Hemlock County, Pennsylvania. Dragged into a courtroom in shackles on federal terrorism charges, he must convince a judge and jury that everything they believe about their local government and their town's chief employer is a lie. His only friends outside the courtroom are a young beautician and a mentally disturbed teenage boy. But saving his life could cost them their own. An epic tale of crime, corruption and environmental destruction, and of one honest man's fight for the truth.

About this title

About the Author

David Poyer’s least-known body of work may be his Hemlock County series, set in a Faulknerian imaginary county in Western Pennsylvania. The first was THE DEAD OF WINTER (Tor Books); the second, WINTER IN THE HEART (Forge Books). AS THE WOLF LOVES WINTER was an alternate selection of The Literary Guild and the Doubleday Book Club. THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAIN, a historical novel set in Depression-era Pennsylvania, with Forge Books/St Martin’s Press, received starred reviews from all three major reviewing agencies. Poyer teaches in the MA/MFA Creative Writing program at Wilkes University.

From Kirkus Reviews

On leave from his skillful and successful military thrillers (The Med, The Gulf, The Circle), Poyer takes his readers to a ravaged corner of Pennsylvania where eco-despair, alcohol, and ruthless business practices make life miserable for everyone. Everyone. Attention Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: you are needed in northwestern Pennsylvania where Siberian weather, toxic dumping, spouse abuse, alcoholism, venereal disease, deforestation, adolescent violence, unemployment, and potholes have made the old oil-pumping town of Raymondsville into an American gulag. And it's getting worse. Loathsome, syphilitic businessman Brad Boulton--the illegitimate son of a coal-field prostitute who married into the town's leading family--is busily turning the nearly bankrupt local oil industry into a shady conglomerate. Boulton is the kind of guy who sees golden financial opportunities in defrocked doctors and bedridden pensioners for his new chain of cut-rate nursing homes. He's recently improved his cash-flow situation by filling emptied oil trucks with pesky toxic industrial waste (mob controlled, of course) from New Jersey, which he has his drivers dump along the roadsides of his own community. Animals are dying and people are getting sick. The demoralized townspeople, grateful for the jobs he's brought to their dying burg, will do anything Boulton wants. The only ones willing to stand up to him are his nasty wife, the electrolysis expert he's been seeing on the side, a crippled but clever schoolboy, and an ancient hard-as-nails hunter. The wife keeps to herself, but the other three get together on a homemade bomb, making good use of that oh-so-handy fertilizer you hear so much about these days. Unremittingly bleak. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Northampton House
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1937997464
• ISBN 13: 9781937997465
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 318