In this poetic and haunting tale set in contemporary Appalachia, New York Times bestselling author Ron Rash illuminates lives shaped by violence and a powerful connection to the land.Les, a long-time sheriff just three-weeks from retirement, contends with the ravages of crystal meth and his own duplicity in his small Appalachian town.Becky, a park ranger with a harrowing past, finds solace amid the lyrical beauty of this patch of North Carolina.Enduring the mistakes and tragedies that have indelibly marked them, they are drawn together by a reverence for the natural world. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming.

The 2008 recession, the private ownership of a nature resort and the prominence of meth addiction all play important roles in the story — and seem to have irrevocably changed this Appalachian town. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Becky survived a school shooting as a girl and is still haunted by it in her mid-forties. In Becky's words: The next morning as I'd hiked out, I started to step over a log but my foot jerked back. While Becky’s voice stands out confidently, she and her observations rarely propel or inform the plot at all, making her chapters at best a momentary reprieve from a tense chapter and at worst frustratingly obfuscatory.

Each tells a compelling story from differing perspectives, male and female. It depicts a world in need of redemption, and Rash suggests, that redemption is available if the sinners just look for it. Pre-publication book reviews and features keeping readers and industry

Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs.

uncle Gerald Blackwelder has been caught poaching fish on Harold Tucker’s Locust Resort property, just above the Creek’s waterfall.

sheriff, and a damaged reclusive forest ranger who spends her days working amidst the bucolic surrounds of Locust Creek Park situated on the edge of the Appalachian mountains.

What gripped me in my old favorite, One Foot in Eden, were the strongly drawn relationships—between the young couple at the beginning of the book, between the couple and a roguish neighbor, between the couple and their son many years later—and the threats that tested them—betrayal, adultery, lies, murder. Hmm, yes, you read that correctly. RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020.

Meanwhile, Les learns pretty early on from his old school buddy, C.J. ABOVE THE WATERFALL by Ron Rash ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 8, 2015 For his sixth novel, Rash (The Cove, 2012, etc.) My grandfather needed no watch to tell time. In Above the Waterfall, Rash unfolds a brutal, lyrical tale of a disgraced senior, a retiring county He throws his weight around, collecting videos of Gerald at the Creek and threatening to fire C.J if he doesn’t do something to keep the old man from trespassing on his land. When oil is poured into the river above the waterfall, killing a large number of Locust Creek’s speckled trout population, the blame is squarely laid upon Gerald. As memory cascades through the novel like the rough and tumble waters of Locust Creek, human greed mixes with honesty and betrayal in a setting where the sacred bonds of family are tested to the limit.

She alternates as narrator with Les; her Hopkins-infused musings are a counterpoint to Les’ action-oriented segments. Above the Waterfall’s structure is compelling.

The book does have moments that shine. The prime suspect is elderly landowner Gerald Blackwelder, a good man but ornery and Becky’s staunch supporter in all things environmental. Gerald Blackwelder is in his 70s and owns a piece of land that abuts what is now a fishing resort that features a considerable stock of trout above the waterfall of the title. Their already unsteady relationship is tested when Becky’s love for Gerald, the elderly man accused of poisoning the river, clashes with Les’s duty to uphold the law. The morning after an altercation in the resort parking lot that almost sends Gerald to the morgue, scores of fish wash up on the banks of the creek—poisoned with kerosene dumped into the stream above a waterfall where, according to Gerald, now rare speckled trout have returned. With his retirement imminent, Les is forced to deal with a crime that brings to the surface many of the town’s demons and secrets — and many of his own, too.

Above the Waterfall harks back to Rash’s first novel, One Foot in Eden , another small-town story told from multiple perspectives, but this time there is no immediate noirish hook. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. While the book’s scant plot stretches to 250 pages, it feels like a stretch, as though elongated by unnecessary digressions and Becky’s lyrical chapters. Among these projects, Rash also published another novel last year. Solace for both Les and Gerald comes in the form of lovely Becky Shytle, the new superintendent of Locust Creek Park. Someone dumped kerosene into the water, killing the fish, and harming business at the resort.

Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. The atavistic like flint rock sparked.

The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it.

When Becky Shytle was in elementary school in Virginia, a gunman invaded her school, killing the teacher who had escorted her to safety.

The existence of these two entities creates a tension between private enterprise and the publicly administered land.

A devotee of Gerard Manley Hopkins, her chapters brim with his kind of allusive, fragmentary poetry as she pieces together her memories with her present struggles, particularly her difficult feelings for Les and the pain of a recently failed relationship with another nature lover, a man who turned out to be an eco-terrorist. Rash goes to some trouble to tell the backstory of both Becky and Les, riddled as they both are with past traumas, and while these details definitely add to the texture of the characters’s voices, they raise more questions than the story is able to address. For instance, Rash allows Les to ponder whether or not the prayers of his secretary are Catholic or Baptist without ever making that detail relevant to the plot or her character. Ron Rash. RELEASE DATE: Sept. 8, 2015. But there's no denying Rash's grasp of the North Carolina landscape and its reflection in the oft-tortured souls of its denizens, making this novel one of his most successful ventures into poetic humanism. Their already unsteady relationship is tested when Becky’s love for Gerald, the elderly man accused of poisoning the river, clashes with Les’s duty to uphold the law.

Magazine Subscribers (How to Find Your Reader Number). Les seems to also believe that the justice system, or perhaps the abstract concept of justice, is crumbling.

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The book can be read as a mystery — or something much more. It's not enough. We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

You’d think a lawman would have some faith in that word, but in thirty years I’d seen too little of it.” – Chapter Eight. When Becky Shytle was in elementary school in Virginia, a gunman invaded her school, killing the teacher who had escorted her to safety.

For his sixth novel, Rash (The Cove, 2012, etc.) Above the Waterfall is astonishing in its ability to capture Appalachian North Carolina and the often torturous nature of the human condition. now is all about tying up some loose ends and getting the paperwork done, and also making sure his young deputy, Jarvis Crow is okay as his replacement.

Gerald insists he's innocent, and Becky takes his side.

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