Ozark Dogs

November 1, 2022

Cranor follows up his debut, the Peter Lovesey--winning Don't Know Tough, with another gritty Arkansas-set mystery. Ozark junkyard owner Jeremiah Fitzjurls has been taking care of granddaughter Joanna since his son's murder conviction, and all's well until the Ledfords, a nasty bunch of meth-dealing white supremacists, come visiting. They seek payback for an injury done them back when by the Fitzjurls family, and Joanna is the price. Based on real-life events in the author's hometown.

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February 1, 2023
A feud between Arkansas families escalates with the fury of Greek tragedy in Cranor's fact-based thriller. Just because 17-year-old Joanna Fitzjurls has lost the competition for Homecoming Queen is no reason why she shouldn't take advantage of the uncharacteristically late curfew her grandfather and guardian, Jeremiah Fitzjurls, has allowed her, and she decides to go all the way with her sort-of-boyfriend, quarterback Colt Dillard. But Colt turns out to be just as inexperienced as she is, and while he's in the bathroom preparing for round two, she takes off on her own. She's quickly picked up by White supremacist skinhead Evail Ledford, who's recently agreed with Guillermo Torres to swap 50 pounds of meth for each American girl Evail can deliver. Evail takes particular pleasure in bagging Jo, because her father, Tommy, is doing time for shooting Evail's brother, Rudnick, and crushing his remains in the trunk of a car in the Fitzjurls family junkyard. Tommy had claimed in court that he was defending the property from a trespasser, but he wasn't any more successful with a jury than Jo was in her nomination for Homecoming Queen. As Craven County Sheriff Mona McNabb, who has a checkered family history of her own, does everything she can to head off a climax as scarifying as it is inevitable, Cranor reveals more and more details about the two families' history until it's clear that Jo's ordeals aren't just an outrage; they're the latest echo of a generational tragedy. Family loyalty, young love, honoring the dead--they're all here, and they all go terribly wrong.

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February 6, 2023
Fully realized characters lift Cranor’s grim second novel (after 2022’s Don’t Know Tough). A dispute over a woman led Tom Fitzjurls to kill Rudnick Ledford by shooting him in the back. The open-and-shut case landed Tom in prison, sentenced to life without parole. That left his father, Jeremiah, a Vietnam vet who operates a car junkyard in Taggard, Ark., to raise Tom’s infant daughter, Jo, after she was abandoned by her mother. Now a high school senior, Jo is chafing to escape her guardian’s tight restrictions on her social life, even as Jeremiah struggles with accepting that she’ll be moving on. Meanwhile, Rud’s brother, Evail, a meth dealer, ex-con, and white supremacist who narrowly avoided being killed at the same time as his sibling, believes he’s found the perfect way to get revenge on the Fitzjurls family. Evail’s threat to Jo forces Jeremiah, who was nicknamed the Judge during his tour of duty for his marksmanship, to team up with several allies he doesn’t fully trust to protect her. The author has a superior gift for capturing the cadences and feel of Southern small towns. Greg Iles fans will be eager for Cranor’s next. Agent: David Hale Smith, InkWell Management.

Starred review from April 15, 2023
Cranor follows his dynamite first novel, Don't Know Tough (2022), with another scorching country noir, this one about two feuding families in a small Ozark town. It's the Fitzjurls vs. the Ledfords, but this is no garden-variety squabble. As former Vietnam sniper Jeremiah Fitzjurl attempts to explain to his granddaughter, Joanna, ""Beyond that door were bloodlines and violence that ran deeper than the limestone caves burrowing their way through the Ozarks."" So, naturally, Jeremiah attempts to keep the door closed, all but imprisoning high-school senior Joanna in the junkyard home where they live. But Joanna, whose father is languishing in the penitentiary after killing one of the Ledfords, is not one to be contained, and so begins the conflagration that this bloodiest of blood feuds (don't forget, there's a sniper in the mix) has been building toward for years. Yes, there is a Romeo and Juliet angle here, but there are deeply hidden secrets, too, secrets that have spawned festering sores that long ago turned malignant. And, above all, there is not one character on either side of the family divide who doesn't bring the reader up short by displaying an unexpected layer of complexity--and even, sometimes, compassion. In only his second novel, Cranor has transformed a familiar noir theme into a multidimensional tragedy of great power and beauty.

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