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34 Shhhhh. Be quiet.
Can you hear that? It’s the sound of my heart breaking.
I first caught wind of this book from Marcus Sakey over at the The Outfit. He had this to say about STONE CITY:
… the book is astonishingly good. Achingly good. Painfully, how-the-hell-does-he-do-that good.
I love Sakey’s debut novel… and his influences. So praise like this made me sit up and take notice.
He was right. STONE CITY is that good.
A college professor, Charlie Bauman, goes to prison after killing a teenage girl in a drunk driving accident. It’s a short hitch, but prison is prison. He manages to make an unassuming life for himself in the can by teaching inmates to read and write. With a year left on his sentence, things look pretty good for him.
That is, until two otherwise disconnected inmates are murdered in similar fashion.
It’s then that Bauman gets recruited separately by both sets of prison leadership—the State’s Attorney and Warden, and the heads of the convict factions—to find out who the killer is. The State thinks it’s an inmate. The inmates think it’s a hack. Either way, Bauman is in way over his head… but his investigation begins nonetheless.
With the help of a punk with ties to one of the recently offed inmates, Bauman navigates the, at times, extraordinarily complex political and social prison landscape to find the killer. At every turn, things are never what they seem and the threat of death is ever present.
Keep in mind, the story takes place entirely in prison, and Smith makes sure we see it all. This book was funny, and sad, and frightening. Most of all, it was surprisingly human.
I’m not kidding… it broke my heart.
P.S. If you want this book, you’ll have to find it at your local library or used bookshop. It’s currently out of print. If you can wait, Busted Flush Press is reissuing it sometime this year. Get it now at Amazon!
P.P.S. If you look at my Library entry for this book, it says it took me a month to read it. That’s not entirely true. While it did take me a while to finish—the first couple hundred pages were slow going for me—I actually set this book aside for a few weeks to read THE DARK RIVER, a Denver Public Library new release with a short due date. I didn’t want the fine for a late return.
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