Dixie Autumn - Softcover

Shinn, Jerry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0615933513 ISBN 13: 9780615933511

Publisher: Pinnacle Ridge Press, 2013

Synopsis

October 1962, and a young newspaper reporter, Hilliard Cooper, returns to his racially tense home town of Allston, South Carolina to find out who set off the midnight explosion that killed his childhood best friend, Charlotte Ravenel. By the time he learns the truth, three other people have been killed, and he might be next.
Decades later, as South Carolinians argue about the Confederate flag that still defiantly flies at the state Capitol, Hill Cooper remembers that October and realizes that "Charlotte was another tragic victim of our tragic history, an innocent and unintended casualty of a war that officially ended almost a century earlier. And now, forty years later, I am the only living person who knows who killed her." 
Until now.... 
Dixie Autumn is an important addition to the literature of the American South -- a gripping, genre-stretching mystery within a powerful, philosophically and historically profound novel. It examines the paradoxical nature of good and evil, the ethical ambiguities of law and journalism, the life-affirming but potentially degrading power of human sexuality, the dangerous synthesis of hate and fear. It is also an unblinking but compassionate examination of the burden of Southern history that confounded the South and the nation in the middle years of the 20th century and continues to confound well into the 21st.

About this title

About the Author:

Jerry Shinn grew up in South Carolina, graduated with Honors in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is a former associate editor, editorial page editor and award-winning columnist for the Charlotte Observer. He now lives and writes fiction, poetry, history, biography, commentary and music in the North Carolina mountains.

Review:

Dixie Autumn is a "must read" for every Southerner. Jerry Shinn has married his rich experience--small town South Carolina youngster, Chapel Hill undergrad in the 1950s, reporter and editor and a keen observer of the racial tensions of the 1960s--with his vivid imagination to devise a plot that will keep you turning pages until the end. His carefully drawn characters--the good, the bad, and the dead--will stay in your head and heart for weeks.
--Jon Buchan, author of Code of the Forest

Walker Percy said he was a typical southern boy: he liked fast cars, pretty girls, barbecue, and bourbon. Hill Cooper possesses many of these same qualities, plus a sense of decency and conscience. While Dixie Autumn is a first rate mystery, it also explores Hill's friendship-romance with Charlotte Ravenel, through flashbacks which glimmer with poetic vignettes. The last image of the story is unique and hard to forget. In fact, you don't want to forget it. Jerry Shinn shines.
--Ben Greer, author of Time Loves a Hero, The Loss of Heaven and Murder in the Holy City

Jerry Shinn rivets us at the intersection of good and evil, black and white, soul-searching and rationalization. Through a brash young reporter who returns home to investigate the death of his friend, we re-live those dark days of the 1960s when the South's raw seams were on display. With aching detail, he recreates the interplay of place and time, proving himself again a noble thinker and now a master storyteller.
--Dannye Romine Powell, author of Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers

About this edition

• Publisher: Pinnacle Ridge Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0615933513
• ISBN 13: 9780615933511
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 266