RaveThe Dallas Morning NewsRoger D. Hodge, a writer and editor with deep Texas roots, now offers an earnest, honest and learned excursion. Freed from his \'spiritual exile\' in the faraway land of Brooklyn, Hodge retraces some family footsteps en route to exploring his \'lost Texas landscape\' — as well as exploring himself, however cautiously ... As the book\'s title suggests, this is not a quest for quaint county fairs and colorful local attractions... Hodge is on the prowl for darker, more meaningful, more telling places and people ... This is part elegy, part picaresque, part memoir and part history, all bound together in prose that is by turns lyrical and slashing ... The book calls to mind Ian Frazier\'s Great Plains, the 1989 melancholy paean to America\'s wind-blown prairie ... Splendid writers like Hodge, with a sharp sense of history and a loving but unsparing pen, help us understand what we\'re seeing as we go.
Kathleen Kent
PositiveThe Dallas Morning News\"Ryhzyk is an engaging twist on traditional tropes. Sure, she has to deal with soul-corroding police matters but she also brings freshness and new energy to the role ... Yet readers of noir will find much that is familiar. For example, Rhyzyk apparently graduated from the traditional wisecracking gumshoe school of hard knocks ... There\'s no shortage of Pine Curtain gothic in this landscape of mangy dogs, religious nuts and violent meth-heads. The final chapters bristle with action and are not for the squeamish.\
Skip Hollandsworth
RaveThe Dallas Morning NewsHollandsworth spent more than decade pulling this tale together and shows himself to be a master storyteller working at the top of his form ... Though a tale of serial murder, this also unfolds as a story of the city itself.
