Bad Axe County

by John Galligan

Overview

Dennis Lehane meets Megan Miranda in this “dark beauty of a novel” (William Kent Krueger, New York Times bestselling author) about the first female sheriff in rural Bad Axe County, Wisconsin, as she searches for a missing girl, battles local drug dealers, and seeks the truth about the death of her parents twenty years ago—all as a winter storm rages in her embattled community.

Fifteen years ago, Heidi White’s parents were shot to death on their Bad Axe County farm. The police declared it a murder-suicide and closed the case. But that night, Heidi found the one clue she knew could lead to the truth—if only the investigators would listen.

Now Heidi White is Heidi Kick, wife of local baseball legend Harley Kick and mother of three small children. She’s also the interim sheriff in Bad Axe. Half the county wants Heidi elected but the other half will do anything to keep her out of law enforcement. And as a deadly ice storm makes it way to Bad Axe, tensions rise and long-buried secrets climb to the surface.

As freezing rain washes out roads and rivers flood their banks, Heidi finds herself on the trail of a missing teenaged girl. Clues lead her down twisted paths to backwoods stag parties, derelict dairy farms, and the local salvage yard—where the body of a different teenage girl has been carefully hidden for a decade.

As the storm rages on, Heidi realizes that someone is planting clues for her to find, leading her to some unpleasant truths that point to the local baseball team and a legendary game her husband pitched years ago. With a murder to solve, a missing girl to save, and a monster to bring to justice, Heidi is on the cusp of shaking her community to its core—and finding out what really happened the night her parents died.

With “striking prose, engaging characters, and a searing story of crimes rooted in the heartland,” Bad Axe County is a “darkly irresistible thriller” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) that you won’t be able to put down.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982110727
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	07/09/2019
Series:	A Bad Axe County Novel , #1
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	261,736
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

John Galligan is the author of four Bad Axe County novels including, Bad Axe County, Dead Man Dancing, and Bad Moon Rising. He is also the author of the Fly Fishing Mystery series, The Nail Knot, The Blood Knot, The Clinch Knot, The Wind Knot, and the novel Red Sky, Red Dragonfly. He lives and teaches college writing in Madison, Wisconsin.  

Editorial Reviews

05/27/2019

On a summer day in 2004, high school senior Heidi White, the heroine of this intense thriller from Galligan (The Wind Knot and three other Fly Fishing mysteries), has just given a speech as the newly crowned Wisconsin Dairy Queen when her chaperone draws her aside to tell her that her parents have been shot on their farm. The police believe it to be a murder-suicide, but not Heidi. In 2016, Heidi is the interim sheriff in rural Bad Axe County, where she’s searching for Pepper Greengrass, a 16-year-old runaway. Chapters from Pepper’s perspective reveal that she has traveled with her pimp to a backwoods stag party, where she underestimates his vicious intent while looking for opportunities to escape. Heidi’s investigation eventually leads to a sex trafficking ring, embroiling members of the local baseball team and casting suspicion onto one-time pitching ace Harley Kick, Heidi’s husband, who may be involved with another teenage girl’s disappearance. Galligan smoothly balances multiple story lines as Heidi also draws closer to the truth about her parents’ deaths. Readers will hope this is the start of a series. Agent: Joanna MacKenzie, Nelson Literary. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"If Joseph Conrad had really wanted to find the heart of darkness, he’d have looked in Bad Axe County. Lurking in the isolated coulees at the edge of the Mississippi River are some of the meanest, foulest, cruelest hearts imaginable, and John Galligan evokes them with all the intensity of a mad poet. But in county sheriff Heidi Kick, a woman chipped and broken on every edge, Galligan offers a righteous force in opposition...A dark beauty of a novel."

William Kent Krueger

"Gritty, brash, and totally gripping. John Galligan is a hell of a writer."

The Real Book Spy

"An exceptional novel...Kick is a remarkable character and this is a bad-axe book."

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Fast-paced and utterly addictive. I loved Heidi kick, the Dairy-Queen-turned-sheriff. Long may she reign."

Lori Rader-Day

★ 2019-05-13
The small towns and coulees of southwest Wisconsin might not sound like a typical setting for a noir crime novel, but some very dark deeds propel this one.

Galligan (The Wind Knot, 2011, etc.) builds the complex plot of this intense novel around three strong central characters. Heidi Kick is interim sheriff of rural Bad Axe County, tapped after the death of her corrupt predecessor. Besides dealing with workplace sexism and the seemingly endless crimes generated by pervasive poverty and substance abuse, she's still trying to solve the deaths of her parents 12 years ago, wrongly (she believes) written off as a murder-suicide. Bad Axe native and one-time local baseball hero Angus Beavers walks out of spring training in Florida to return to his family's junkyard when he hears the old sheriff is dead, pursuing a mysterious mission involving a long-frozen corpse. Teenage Pepper Greengrass arrives in the Bad Axe town of Farmstead in the van of a pimp, having run away from her home in the Wisconsin Dells and her abusive stepfather. She's armed with lots of attitude but might have underestimated how much danger awaits her. In well-crafted prose, Galligan alternates among them until their stories crash together in a mystery driven by savage misogyny and human trafficking. His portrait of life in the rural Midwest is about as far from bucolic as possible but vividly convincing. The book pulls no punches in its nightmarish depictions of violence, an essential part of its plot. In its early chapters, the book's mordant humor, female sheriff, and quirky minor characters echo the movie Fargo, but Galligan raises the stakes beyond the comic. And indomitable Heidi, fiercely smart Pepper, and Angus, goodhearted despite his dreadful upbringing, are characters worth caring about.

Striking prose, engaging characters, and a searing story of crimes rooted in the heartland power a darkly irresistible thriller.

Kirkus Reviews