Crime Fiction: The Hanging Tree by Bryan Gruley

Today in January Magazine’s crime fiction section, Brendan M. Leonard reviews The Hanging Tree by Bryan Gruley. Says Leonard:

I grew up in small-town northeastern Ohio, which shares many similarities with the small-town Michigan of Bryan Gruley’s Starvation Lake (2009). Those similarities ran deep enough that Gruley’s first novel, nominated for an Edgar Award this year, resonated with me. In addition to being a son of the fabled land that gave the world rock ’n’ roll (as well as Drew Carey, Devo and Chrissie Hynde), I’m also the son of a newspaperman and spent much of my youth in newsrooms. Gruley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, evoked in his debut novel that twilight time in the late 1990s, before the Internet gutted the newspaper industry but after everyone knew it was only a matter of time for the ink-stained wretches, with the same simple, memorable prose that he used to describe daily life in a post-industrial town.

The full review is here.