Andrew Welsh-Huggins's "The End of The Road," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The End of the Road by Andrew Welsh-Huggins.

The entry begins:

My new Ohio-set crime novel, The End of The Road, tells the story of a young woman, Penny, and her solo journey of vengeance after her boyfriend is shot and left for dead. It’s my eighth novel but my first stand-alone after writing seven books about Columbus-based private eye Andy Hayes. The novel loosely uses the structure of Homer’s Odyssey as it weaves together the stories of three main characters—Penny; Pryor, the villain she pursues after her boyfriend, Myles, is shot; and J.P., a sheriff’s deputy who inadvertently finds himself caught up in the action.

The actor I’d tap to play Penny is Kaitlyn Dever. She’s not a household name—yet—but to my mind, she exhibits the perfect world-weary demeanor and inner strength needed to play Penny, a single mom who’s struggled to make it while Myles was in prison and will now do pretty much anything to eliminate Pryor once and for all. I first saw Dever in the FX series Justified, where she played tough-as-nails teenager Loretta McCready, a girl informally adopted by Kentucky crime boss Mags Bennett (Margo Martindale), after Bennett poisoned McCready’s father. Dever has also had roles in the movies Booksmart and Dear Evan Hansen, and a smaller part in Dopesick, the HBO series about the history of the opioid epidemic.

For Pryor, a vicious, one-eyed thug (my nod to the Odyssean cyclops, Polyphemus), I’d love to see...[read on]

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My Book, The Movie: The End of the Road.

--Marshal Zeringue