Hard Cash Valley is a rock-solid country noir crime thriller set in the same northern Georgia mountains as two earlier books by Panowich. From the opening scene through to the end, it's a hard-to-put-down action-packed ride. Panowich takes the classic scene of a petty conman/gambler/ thief on the run with a suitcase full of money and breathes new life into this crime fiction trope. And our petty grifter isn't even the star of the show. That's a life-weary arson investigator haunted by a past so harrowing that lesser men would've home and swallowed their guns and by a death sentence he can't come to grips with. The ghosts of his past, particularly the gorgeous Gwen, are so real. But, the horrors of the present can't be ignored. A lot of the time these crime thrillers are peopled by caricatures of real people, but the characters here are real, vivid, believable, and desperately flawed. A terrific read!

Hard Cash Valley is a rock-solid country noir crime thriller set in the same northern Georgia mountains as two earlier books by Panowich. From the opening scene through to the end, it's a hard-to-put-down action-packed ride. Panowich takes the classic scene of a petty conman/gambler/ thief on the run with a suitcase full of money and breathes new life into this crime fiction trope. And our petty grifter isn't even the star of the show. That's a life-weary arson investigator haunted by a past so harrowing that lesser men would've home and swallowed their guns and by a death sentence he can't come to grips with. The ghosts of his past, particularly the gorgeous Gwen, are so real. But, the horrors of the present can't be ignored. A lot of the time these crime thrillers are peopled by caricatures of real people, but the characters here are real, vivid, believable, and desperately flawed. A terrific read!