Available May, 2020

Thanks to Brian Panowich, St. Martin’s Press, and Netgalley for providing me with a digital advance copy of this novel.

Panowich’s previous novel, Bull Mountain, was one of my favorite books of 2016, and I also very much enjoyed his next novel, Like Lions, so I couldn’t wait to start Hard Cash Valley. While this novel is set in the same part of north Georgia and has some of the same characters as the previous two novels, it is very different. It features a new main character in GBI Agent Dane Kirby. I enjoyed Kirby’s complicated backstory and I liked him a lot as a character. However, I liked the plot of this novel less than the previous ones — the cockfighting angle and the very long list of bad actors in this novel left me kind of cold.

Overall, I would recommend this book but with a few caveats. I hope that Dane Kirby will be a recurring character in a future novel from Panowich and I look forward to reading his next work. If you have not yet read any of Panowich’s books, I highly recommend reading Bull Mountain.