Rising out of northeast Georgia's Appalachian Highlands, fictional Bull Mountain stands near Atlanta, the self-proclaimed capital of the New South, and Augusta. In Brian Panowich's arresting first novel, Bull Mountain is home to the Burroughs family, a six-generation clan of outlaws whose attachment to the land passes father to son, along with a violent distrust of outsiders. McFalls County Sheriff Clayton Burroughs, though, is the first of his family to try to go straight.
Whatever governments forbid, outlaws provide--be it poached meat and fur, moonshine, marijuana or, in the 21st century, methamphetamine. Clayton's father, Gareth, burned up in a crank cookhouse fire, his brother Buckley was ambushed and killed by the feds, and his last brother, Hal, now runs the mountain with sociopathic violence and bootleg assault rifles from a Jacksonville, Fla., biker gang. Bull Mountain is a Cain-and-Abel story of Clayton and Hal, good and evil, law and outlaws--but it is also the story of family and its tenacious hold on generations.
A road-weary singer-songwriter and professional firefighter in east Georgia, Panowich plants his Bull Mountain squarely within the niche genre of "country noir." As in the best of this lot, his minor lowlife characters are often the most entertaining. There are few women on the mountain (in the roles of either mother or whore--or both) except Clayton's wife, Kate, who serves as an anchor in his conflicted life. After Panowich's plot follows its twisting path to a surprising ending, it is clear that this is but the first of what could be a Bull Mountain run of fine cracker crime fiction. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.