The Blood Knot

by John Galligan

Overview

The last thing The Dog wanted was to find another body. But there was Annie Adams - the barn lady - floating dead at his feet, her easel and paints set up on the bridge above his head. And so The Dog wades his way through Kussmaul country encountering a confessing nine year old, a dispute over trespassing, a shunned Amish woman, and a quite possibly rabid beaver. And The Dog knows, this is not a fishing trip.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440532375
Publisher:	Gallery Books
Publication date:	07/01/2011
Series:	A Fly Fishing Mystery , #2
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
Sales rank:	652,902
File size:	772 KB

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

Galligan's rewarding if grim second fly-fishing mystery (after 2003's The Nail Knot) offers an emotionally tortured protagonist, Ned Oglivie (aka Dog), and a clan of misfits and survivors worthy of Faulkner, the Kussmauls, who coexist uneasily with each other and their Amish neighbors in remote Avalanche, Wis. Searching for oblivion on a three-year fishing trip and suffering from a vicious beaver bite, Dog is tramping through the woods one morning when he sees 10-year-old Deuce Kussmaul fire his kid-sized .22 into the body of "barn lady" Annie Adams lying in a stream. (Annie liked to paint pictures of barns.) After Deuce's mother, Eve, who's a banned Amish and a meth-user, treats Dog's beaver bite, he agrees to try to prove her son didn't kill Annie. The author brilliantly draws the Snopes-like Kussmauls while writing with flair and passion about fly-fishing, art and fate. But like J. Robert Janes's St. Cyr and Kohler series, Galligan will need to be hand-sold to reach the right audience. 20-city author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A superbly told tale of trout and red herrings chased with vodka and Tang. Over the past three years, Ned "Dog" Oglivie has fished most of the streams in North America (The Nail Knot, not reviewed), but he still hasn't recovered from the bathtub drowning of his four-year-old son. As he camps in Avalanche, Wisc., home to the redneck Kussmaul clan and various Amish families-and temporary venue of artist Annie Adams and her second husband, Howard-Dog wallows in his loneliness, spends days fly-casting and nights drinking, and somehow strikes up a tentative friendship with Annie. Early one morning, he hears shots and rushes to find banned Amish woman Eve and King Midas Kussmaul's ten-year-old son Deuce taking pot shots at Annie's dead body and brashly announcing, "I killed her. Go tell somebody." Well, why would he? wonders Dog, a question that entwines his life with those of Salt Box, Half-Timber, Uncle Roundy, old Ma Kussmaul, pipe-smoking Eve, nubile Dorcas and her strict Amish father, Freeman Yoder. Was Annie killed because of something she witnessed and painted at one of the Kussmaul barns? Matters are complicated by a peeping Tom, his creepy porno pictures and Dorcas's romance with an "English," Annie's son Robin. But the climax is uglier and sadder, causing sweeping moral evaluations. The tetchy xenophobia of Witness combined with the unbridled energy of Deliverance and a touch of The Compleat Angler: one helluva story.

Kirkus Reviews