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Random House
August 2013
On Sale: August 13, 2013
256 pages
ISBN: 1400068622
EAN: 9781400068623
Kindle: B00BH0VSJY
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary
Karr, a stunning memoir of a mother-son relationship that is
also the searing, unflinching account of a murder and its
aftermath Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain’s
death, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a
passing curiosity. “A real-life old West murder mystery,”
the local TV announcers intone, while barroom gossips
snicker cruelly. But for her twenty-year-old son, Justin St.
Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world
into before and after. Distancing himself from the legendary town of his childhood,
Justin makes another life a world away in San Francisco and
achieves all the surface successes that would have filled
his mother with pride. Yet years later he’s still sleeping
with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he is pulled
back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to
make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, a
onetime army paratrooper, the type of woman who would stand
up to any man except the men she was in love with? What led
her to move from place to place, man to man, job to job,
until finally she found herself in a desperate and
deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of
desert with an unstable ex-cop? Justin’s journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt
Earp, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of
stepfathers who were a constant, sometimes threatening
presence in his life, to a harsh world on the margins full
of men and women all struggling to define what family means.
He decides to confront people from his past and delve into
the police records in an attempt to make sense of his
mother’s life and death. All the while he tries to be the
type of man she would have wanted him to be.
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