A LOVELY AND FEARFUL THING 

Deceit, lust, loss, guilt, and revenge are all part of Matthew Calhoun’s acutely observed and deeply thoughtful account of the Harrisons, the richest and most prominent, but hardly the most upstanding, family in the small south Georgia town of Thornhurst. At the center of the story, set in the recent past, is the somewhat suspicious death of golden boy Donnie Harrison, and revolving around that death are the romantic entanglements of his gorgeous widow, of his domineering father, and of his PhD aunt from Boston, a former ‘60s hippie and family embarrassment. In each of these entanglements the love of women is indeed, as Lord Byron puts it, “a lovely and a fearful thing. SHOP ON AMAZON

 

MURDER in SAVANNAH 

The faculty, staff, and student body of a fictional state university in Savannah are shaken up by the brutal revenge-style murder of a polarizing feminist English professor, Dr. Mildred Margulis. As rookie homicide detective and Margulis’s former student T.J. Loomis discovers and reveals in telling detail, the halls of academe are hardly the preserves of high-minded duty and collegiality that they appear to be.  SHOP ON AMAZON

 

 

IN ANOTHER TIME 

Set during the First World War, William Breedlove Martin’s IN ANOTHER TIME is the intense drama of the Lansdownes, a big, well-to-do family in a small Southern town. As the brothers Laurence and Victor leave for the front as fighter pilots, their overbearing father, Buck, and the five Lansdowne women are left to face the uncertainty and the fear of a world, and a family, at war. SHOP ON AMAZON 

 

 

AFTER THE RUN: THE DECLINE AND FALL OF A HEISMAN TROPHY WINNER

In the recent past in Savannah, at and around a fictional university in the Southeastern Conference, narrator Guy Givens gets caught in a firestorm of scandals set by an activist black administrator, an eminent gay English professor, and a Heisman Trophy winner, Billy Gene Wells, Givens’s best friend and teammate on the National Championship team of 1963. A further complication for Givens is that he has long been in love with Wells’s wife.Just as MOBY DICK is about more than just whaling, so AFTER THE RUN is about more than just football. Foremost among its concerns are three highly volatile issues of enduring contemporaneity: one, the descent into criminality of pampered athletic standouts; two, the exploitation of physically gifted but academically inept athletes, especially black ones, by major colleges and universities: and three, the sexual abuse of subordinates by people of power and influence.Caveat: This novel is not at all discreet, let alone politically correct, in its fact-based depictions of certain generally hushed-up aspects of race and sexuality. SHOP ON AMAZON