A damn fine debut from Sean Jacques and another high caliber release from Shotgun Honey! Much like the Firebird driven by protagonist Pen Cullen, Doe Run muscles through the Ozark countryside with speed and masterful maneuvers. Buckle up for a rousing ride!

This one was so so. Is the writing good, yes. Does the book really do anything, no. It's a story about a small town and small characters that depends upon suspension of disbelief.

I've got this e-book from Netgalley. The core of the story is a love triangle. A guy comes back to his little hometown for his inheritance from his father. He left his father in a brawl with him. In the beginning, he crashes into a doe with his car. The buddy of Doe-Crasher married his girlfriend and the pair had had a boy who had been shot. I couldn't see a conflict at the beginning, but the thrill increases during the continuing of the story. The backdrop of the story is an important element. We have a local area in the downturn. The author describes the circumstances and the people of the Ozarks area with little dialog and anecdotes. There is brawling in a saloon, a child's death, violence in a family, murder and screwed-up lives. I was compelled by the fates of the protagonists. Not a simple read but rewarding.

"he began to wonder why it was that every decision and every direction he'd taken in his life turned out to be an act of straddling over a new desperation that he never saw coming."

Rural crime fiction is not what I instinctively reach for as a reader - guess I've always been a city slicker, and I'm definitely a sucker for those stories set in the mean streets of wherever. But a good book is a good book, and Sean Jacques has written a GREAT one.

We meet Pen Cullen - a hard living Ozark native who's come back to the town he'd left behind years before. Ghosts lurk on every corner of the place. Old flames, old friends, old grievances. What grabs you with Doe Run is the absolute vivid detail of the writing. This is a place you can see and smell, brought to life through tactile imagery and dialogue that crackles like the embers of a brush fire.

Unlike some of the recent Shotgun Honey books like The Mountain Mystic by Russell W. Johnson which cut through some of the hardscrabble grit with moments of levity, Doe Run is a book that flies out of the gate with pain and tragedy and a sense of doom on the horizon - it rarely (if ever) lets up.

Gradually we learn about why Pen left, where he's been, and what is waiting for him when he returns. All the while, the story is on a collision course with deer season and a reckoning with the past. There's an ineviatbility about how everything comes together (or falls apart) by the end, but a final zag that I didn't see coming. I'm not sure if it's a shot at redemption of a stay of execution.

Doe Run reads like Cormac behind the wheel of a Pontiac Firebird with a Colt .45 chugging Budweisers and chain smoking Camels - one eye on the road in front of him, the other watching his rearview. It's not pretty, but it's beautiful.

Thanks to Shotgun Honey for the ARC.