No Good Brother

The last Tyler Keevil novel I read was his phantasmagorical road trip The Drive, which I hugely enjoyed. This is a different beast, one much more grounded in reality, but it's just as good a read. Our narrator is a fisherman, working a difficult but above board life until his brother, out of jail and involved with some gangsters, shows up needing his help....that's all the plot description you're going to get, because the twists, turns and reveals of the novel are half the fun. Basically, if you like Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska album, you're going to love this. It captures that same sense of hardscrabble lives, of trying to live the best you can under impossible circumstances. One of the epigraphs at the beginning is from the song Highway Patrolman, and it's perfect for this tale of brotherly loyalty trumping the sensible and safe, frankly better, alternatives. Sometimes it's sad, sometimes it's (darkly) funny, sometimes it's unbearably tense, but it's always very very readable.