I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.Good page-turner, a noir set in backwoods Mississippi, complete with crooked cops, cranked-up fiends, and all the white-trash you can handle. The writing was excellent, and the dialogue was well-written in the local vernacular and slang you'd expect.I'd recommend this to anyone that's a fan of noir-style thrillers, or fans of Deliverance... :D

Synopsis/blurb…..God, drugs, corruption, and morality come together in this gripping tale of desperationIn Gasconade County, Missouri—once called the meth capital of the world—Deputy Sherriff Dale Banks discovers $52,000 hidden in the broken-down trailer that Jerry Dean Skaggs uses for cooking crystal. And he takes it. Banks knows what he did was wrong, but he did it for all the right reasons. At least, he thinks so. But for every wrong, there is a consequence.Jerry Dean can’t afford to lose tha...

I made it to the 53% point of this routine grit lit before giving up. There were too many lowlifes and it was impossible to tell them apart. There was also too much testosterone and stupidity. Gross descriptions were introduced for shock value. I should have known better than to try to read this when the prologue started with horse butchering (with the guts fed to pigs for a special added touch). This just wasn’t for me. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

This book definitely is NOT a fairy tale.Banks and his partner are staking out a tweaker and Banks finds the meth head's stash of cash. (In a turd filled cat litter box) He takes it. Figuring he needs it for his family and no one's ever going to know.Yeah right. This book is full of some of the white trashest people I've found in books. Oh and I flipping loved it. Matthew McBride fills the characters out so that you almost smell the stench of that broke down trailer.Maybe people should be mad...

As unpredictable and violent as the meth trade and those who swarm towards its deathly drug addled embrace, A SWOLLEN RED SUN is the raw, uncut, pure embodiment of noir versed in a kind of hick/back-water literature akin to Daniel Woodrell. When Deputy Sheriff Banks discovers a hidden stash of cash in a cooks’ trailer buried beneath kitty litter and excrement, he can’t turn a blind eye. Thinking it a victimless crime (Jerry Dean, the trailers occupant cant report the cash stolen by virtue of how...

★★★☆☆½Upon completion, I swore to review this book, yet here we are a few months removed and I’m just now getting around to it. What can I say, my procrastination knows no bounds. I’m too easily distracted by this goddam Golden Age of Television™. To make matters worse, the latest ios update inadvertently wiped away all my saved notes, so it looks like I’ll be writing this one off the cuff. Thanks, Apple! Our story kicks off when a seemingly honest cop is staking out a meth den and stumbles acro...

8/10Whoever said that drugs were bad needs to read this! What a great novel and it’s all down to drugs! They are the stare of the show, without them we wouldn’t have so many f*cked up characters all in one little place! Well, that is said a little tongue in cheek and I don’t condone drug taking so put that spliff down or I will frown. This book has a wealth of characters ranging from; the police who are “responsible” and authoritative (and also take $52k from drug dealers because, better their p...

missouri. meth. trailers. police. cat piss. convicts. $52,000. shotguns. meth. rednecks. armed robbery. horsemeat. dogs. kidnapping. trucks. shed. marijuana. violence. chains. meth. family. pigs. cracker barrel. knives. incest. tweakers. slaughter. alcohol. motel. noir. domestic violence. meth. rifles. anhydrous ammonia. suicide. trucks. taxidermy. hammer. duffel bag. goats. murder. murder. murder. (meth). skoal. tractor. beer. rooster. jail. accidents. consequences. nostalgia. rape. ax. adulter...

Such a sad book, filled with desperate people leading desperate lives. Some of them are just evil, others totally over their heads with no future and an ugly present.Reading about them is compelling, however, always wondering what other tragedy lies just over the hill.You won't like any of the characters -- well, perhaps Olen is an exception, -- but you'll feel sorry for some, pity others, and be very glad you play no part in their lives. Most of them I suspect would be waving Confederate flags

(I received a free copy of this from NetGalley for this review.)The alcohol intake by the main character in Matthew McBride’s last novel Frank Sinatra in a Blender made me feel like I needed a liver transplant. The tweakers of A Swollen Red Sun have me thinking I should go to rehab. In rural Missouri Deputy Sherriff Dale Banks is trying to find lowlife Jerry Dean Skaggs, but instead discovers over $50,000. Banks takes the money which contributes to an on-going string of increasingly violent crim...

Officer Dale Everett Banks comes into money when he nabs fifty-two thousand from the trailer of known meth dealer Jerry Dean Skaggs. When Skaggs discovers his loot is missing, all hell breaks loose. You see, the money wasn’t all his – it’s owed to several partners as well as a crooked cop. With his back against the wall, Jerry Dean has his work cut out for him.I received a free copy from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.When it comes to writing, there’s a piece of adv...

Another leisurely paced stunner.Leisurely paced until the floor flies up and slaps you in the face. Intermittently.This the 2nd Matthew McBride novel I've purchased and read and as brilliant as the last:Frank Sinatra in a Blender.This is a gravel-road noir set in Gasconade County, Missouri presumably present-day. The back roads, the hollers, the hills are all filled with the weird and the wired and rocking out in the key of meth. Them not cranking out are cooking up the poison in children's bedr...

I was talking to a book rep and telling her that I was only reading books more than 100 years old this year. She had an angelic face and a soft voice and said she had just the book for me, this one. I looked at it and thought, OK, this has to be arty and it's short, a good airplane read. But that seraphic sales rep must have a very dark side. The characters in this mystery/detective story die gruesome deaths in the meth-filled Ozarks in page after page. A Swollen Red Sun is a slice of grim, plot...

When Deputy Sheriff Dale Banks finds $52,000 hidden in a catbox, he does the wrong thing for the right reasons. The missing money touches off a blaze of meth, murder, and mayhem!I got this from Netgalley.If there is a golden rule in crime fiction, it's that if you find a hidden pile of money, do not take it or the shit will hit the fan! In this case, the shit is a group of lowlife meth heads and the fan is Deputy Sheriff Dale Banks.A Swollen Red Sun takes place in Gasconade County, Missouri, one...

This is a high three. High being the operative word here because the meth fumes wafting from its pages are strong enough to transmogrify the reader into a slavering crystal junkie. Buyer beware. If that's not enough, the uncompromising and relentless violence as well as the suffocating pall of dysfunctional rural living are such to jar anyone's safe suburban sensibilities and make you glad you're a city rat. Matthew McBride is a welcome addition to the Rural Noir / Hick Lit crowd -- (i.e. Daniel...

A shudder went through me as I pressed the five star rating, but it's true: this is among the very best of its genre. Think of Deliverance; think of The Shawshank Redemption on steroids. No...picture it on crank.A Swollen Red Sun is set in the middle of the hills and "hollers" in Missouri, a long, long way from a real city, a miserable, impoverished place where some folks' goal is just to find a nice, normal person to smoke crank with instead of all these crazies. (I am avoiding the direct quota...

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/I’m at the point where I’m so far behind that I was prepared to just post a link to Ron 2.0’s review and call it a good day . . . . until I reconfirmed he’s an even bigger slacker than I am and hasn’t posted a review yet either. Great minds slack alike.I’m suffering from a severe case of old lady brain at the moment and can’t remember what the hell we had all just read that was hick-a-riffic, but in the course of commentating amongst o...

3.5 STARS Is it redundant to call anything from hick-lit gritty? And grainy? While carrying the stench of eighty-percent humidified and sweat-drenched bodies across its pages? In any case, this is such a departure from my usual reading choices that you’ll have to forgive me if I may come across like a tourist in a petting zoo. I imagine myself taking selfies with the Meth Addict who shot a bald eagle and the crazy Reverend butchering horses and pigs as sacrifices while he cooks the best crank

Welcome to Hardscrabble, USA. This used to be a place where men carved a living out of the land; farmed livestock, raised families, rode steers and stayed honest. Now it’s redneck central, rotten trailers rusting on dusty tracks; crank-addicts toking and buying and selling the product brewed by those feared, weird men who never come down from the mountain. Welcome to the world of A Swollen Red Sun.A compelling contemporary novel if ever there was one, A Swollen Red Sun treads the same tracks as

None of the reasons why I loved Matthew McBride's first novel FRANK SINATRA IN A BLENDER are present in this book, but none of the reasons why I loved A SWOLLEN RED SUN were present in FRANK SINATRA IN A BLENDER. The two novels are so different and yet so complex and engrossing in their own, idiosyncratic way, I can only applaude Matthew McBride's Lansdale-esque ability to work emotional and narrative scope. A SWOLLEN RED SUN stands on its own as a lean and nuanced piece of country noir.The unwa...