The Whiskey Baron

IPPY SILVER AWARD 2014
Southeast Fiction
Jon Sealy’s award-winning first novel takes you into a Depression-era South Carolina cotton mill town.

South Carolina, 1932. Two shots from a 12-gauge kick off this gripping drama about family ties and bad choices, about the folly of power and the limitations of the law.

Late one night at the end of a scorching summer, a phone call rouses Sheriff Furman Chambers out of bed. Two men have been shot dead on Highway 9 in front of the Hillside Inn, a one-time boardinghouse that is now just a front for Larthan Tull’s liquor business. When Sheriff Chambers arrives to investigate, witnesses say a man named Mary Jane Hopewell walked into the tavern, dragged two of Tull’s runners into the street, and laid them out with a shotgun. Sheriff Chambers’s investigation leads him into the Bell village, where Mary Jane’s family lives a quiet, hardscrabble life of working in the cotton mill. While the weary sheriff digs into the mystery and confronts the county’s underground liquor operation, the whiskey baron himself is looking for vengeance. Mary Jane has gotten in the way of his business, and you don’t do that to Larthan Tull and get away with it.

“In the clearing between the woods and the house, the cornstalks clacked together in the wind. The pulse of crickets in the field sounded like a coming plague. Old Testament times. He carried the shovel to the barn and hung it on the wall where he’d found it hours ago. Blood from his shoulder had soaked everything—his arms, his pants, the shovel—but each scoop of soil had brushed off the blood until the shovel was dry dirt and rust and nothing else. The sticky black dirt on his hands clawed its way up his arms like the loose branches of a hickory in winter, so that he looked like he’d been wrestling with Satan himself. Which he might as well have been.”

— from The Whiskey Baron

praise for the whiskey baron

“A significant new voice in Southern fiction.” —Ron Rash, author of Serena

“A simmering powerhouse of a novel.” —Wiley Cash, author of a A Land More Kind Than Home

“A potent mash-up of noir, Southern fiction and period novel, set in South Carolina during Prohibition … A near flawless effort from a writer to watch.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Jon Sealy has written a lyrical page-turner. The Whiskey Baron is a captivating, beautifully written novel. Who can resist a man named Mary Jane involved in illicit liquor sales? I foresee the beginning a long, successful career.” —George Singleton, author of The Half Mammals of Dixie

“An assured work of literary suspense … Sealy’s finely drawn characters and evocative sense of place and time make this a memorable read, on par with the best of Daniel Woodrell and Ron Rash.” —Library Journal

“This book transcends the notion of its being a Southern novel. It’s an American novel, and Mr. Sealy a grand new talent we’ll hear much from, I am certain.” —Bret Lott, author of Jewel

“What you’d get if Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner co-wrote the HBO series ‘Boardwalk Empire’ while on an especially inspired, existentially tinged bender.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch

“An atmospheric and unbearably suspenseful debut novel.” —Holly Goddard Jones, author of Girl Trouble

“A stunner of a first novel with roots that run deep in the countryside and textile culture of the Carolinas Piedmont…Insightful and beautifully crafted.” —Raleigh News & Observer

“Sealy’s gritty, superbly crafted novel, The Whiskey Baron, hooked me from the opening paragraph…I hated like hell for it to end.” —Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time