Weedeater

Weedeater

A finalist for the 2019 Weatherford Award in Fiction, Weedeater is a contemporary story of love and loss told by a pair of eastern Kentucky mountaineers: Gene, the lovelorn landscaper who bears witness to the misadventures of a family entangled in drugs, artmaking, and politics, a family beset by both environmental and self-destruction; and Dawn Jewell, a young mother searching—for lost family members, lost youth, lost community, and lost heart. Picking up six years after the end of Robert Gipe’s acclaimed first novel, Trampoline, in Weedeater, the reader finds Canard County living through the last hurrah of the coal industry and the most turbulent and deadly phase of the community’s battle with opioid abuse. The events Gipe chronicles are frantic. They are told through a voice by turns taciturn and angry, yet also balanced with humor and stoic grace. Weedeater is a story about how we put our lives back together when we lose the things we thought we couldn’t bear losing, how we find new purpose in what we thought were scraps and trash caught in the weeds.

The Weed Eater

Two of Victor French’s employees are found dead, their bodies partially devoured by a bear. Several of his garbage trucks have been hijacked. Victor realizes that war has been declared. Not wanting the police to pry into his business affairs, French hires private detective Bartholomew Jones to solve the murders and identify the enemy who has targeted his company. Recently disciplined and furloughed by the police department, Jones walks a thin line between possible retention and permanent dismissal. He calls upon his ex-partner for support in solving the case. She pulls no bones about his situation: Department officials are after him. If he doesn’t straighten up, he’ll be begging for money on a street corner by the bus station. When he identifies the man who has declared war on his client, Jones’ secluded cabin is riddled with bullets and then burned to the ground. An innocent woman is murdered. To keep his job, Jones must bring the perpetrator to justice without involving the police. But can justice truly prevail in a corrupt criminal justice system?

Continental Marine