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283, [5] pages. No dust jacket present. Inscribed by the author on the title page. The inscription reads: "For Jean - With Very Best Wishes - T R Pearson". Some cover wear. Corner bumped. Tells the modern Bonnie and Clyde story of Raeford Benton Lynch and Jane Elizabeth Firesheets in the mythic town of Neely, North Carolina. Thomas Reid Pearson (born 1956) is an American writer. Pearson was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was a student at North Carolina State University, where he gained a BA and MA in English. He worked as a carpenter and a housepainter while he began writing his first two novels, A Short History of a Small Place and Off for the Sweet Hereafter. Neither was published until 1985, when he moved to New York City, where both books were issued by Linden Press. His novels are set in the South, in the imaginary small town of Neely, near Winston Salem, or, in his recent novels, in the Appalachian areas of Virginia, where he now lives. His writing captures a uniquely Southern social order, outlook, and voice and has been compared to the work of Mark Twain and William Faulkner. A Short History of a Small Place, Off for the Sweet Hereafter, The Last of How It Was, Cry Me a River, Polar and Blue Ridge were New York Times Notable Books. Pearson collaborated with John Grisham on early drafts of the screenplays for The Rainmaker (1997) and Runaway Jury (1998), films based on two of Grisham's novels. Under the pen name Rick Gavin, Pearson wrote a series of three crime novels, set in the Mississippi Delta, featuring repo man Nick Reid and his best friend, Desmond. Off for the Sweet Hereafter is a 1986 novel by T. R. Pearson. The story opens with a sentence over 400 words long. This opening sets the stage for the expansive tone of the entire novel, which consists of digressions within the plot. Raeford Benton Lynch, nephew to the bald Jeeter, is a cipher, remarkable only for being gangly and horse-faced. On a whim, he accepts a job "digging holes" for Mr. Claude Ellwyn Overhill, who drives a motley assortment of riff-raff around the south, disinterring and relocating the denizens of graveyards that had to be moved to make room for development. Benton Lynch meets Jane Elizabeth Firesheets when he and Mr. Overhill's crew disinter her grandmomma. Jane Elizabeth, for some inscrutable reason, takes a fancy to Benton Lynch, beguiling him with her "milky white parts" and "plum colored parts." Trouble comes in the form of Jimmy, a petty criminal whose renegade nature lures Jane Elizabeth Firesheets away from Benton Lynch. In order to prove that he is as dangerous and ambitious and thus as alluring as Jimmy, Benton Lynch takes to holding up convenience stores and sending clippings about the crimes to Jane Elizabeth Firesheets. This wins her affections away from Jimmy but has an unintended side effect: Jane Elizabeth Firesheets pictures herself as Bonnie to Benton Lynch's Clyde, and insists that the two take off on a crime spree that ends in the shooting of an elderly store clerk.
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