Ten top rural noir novels

Tom Bouman's Dry Bones in the Valley won the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller and the 2015 Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

For the Guardian Bouman tagged his top ten rural noir novels, including:

A Land More Kind Than Home (2012) by Wiley Cash

I have referred elsewhere to this novel as “bighearted”, and I have yet to think of a better word for it. Cash’s work shows how the line between gothic fiction and rural noir can blur, exemplified particularly in the person of Carson Chambliss, a snake-handling preacher disfigured by chemical burns sustained in the production of methamphetamine.

Read about another entry on the list.

My Book, The Movie: A Land More Kind Than Home.

--Marshal Zeringue