Fateful Mornings

Author/Guide: Tom Bouman

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: Dare you enter the woods and the streets of Wild Thyme?

ISBN: 978-0393249644
Genre: Crime

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What you need to know before your trail

Summer has brought Officer Henry Farrell nothing but trouble. Heroin has arrived with a surge in burglaries and other crime. When local carpenter Kevin O’Keeffe admits that he shot a man and that his girlfriend, Penny, is missing, the search leads the small-town cop to an industrial vice district across state lines that has already ensnared more than one of his neighbors.

With the patience of a hunter, Farrell ventures into a world of shadow beyond the fields and forests of home.

Locations

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Travel Guide

Pennslyvania

Wild Thyme is fictional remote township in rural North East Pennsylvania and once you’ve visited this godforsaken place you’ll be pleased that is the case. The author Tom lives in the real area but puts on a black and distorted filter onto the real picture – his insider and local knowledge of customs and lifestyle rings true. There is authenticity on each and every page. The sense of place is strong and alluring:

“Who named the lake Maiden’s Grove I do know know, probably the same person who named out township Wild Thyme, back two hundred years ago when northern Pennsylvania was still frontier. They arrived and there it was, a deep glacial rut fed by springs and spilling into January Creek, hooking in to the Susquehanna at some point south, and then running hundreds of miles out to the Chesapeake Bay”

Henry Farrell moved here for a quiet life in Dry Bones in the Valley but that might not have been the wisest decision. Henry however has become this town just as it has become him – his wife died, poisoned by the effects of fracking and gas exploration out West – as it destroyed and polluted the landscape, so too did it their marriage and ultimately their lives. Pennsylvania was supposed to be a new start.

Wild Thyme is rural Pennsylvania – quiet, quaint and unassuming destroyed from the inside by a community keen to retain its strength and land. The township is being torn apart by environmental issues but the community is breaking up with it. This is nice looking country but the dark clouds of greed, desire and drugs are shifting ever more in to the bigger picture. The sense of place is evocative and full of nuanced detail – you can feel the dust on the page, the winds ruffle the corn in the fields and the sky changing through a spectrum of greys and golds. This is Rural Noir with a pitchfork stabbed in your heart for good measure

Booktrailer Review

Susan @thebooktrailer

There’s something very reassuring about this book – the sense of place is just brilliant and despite it being a fictional setting, you can tell the author is from the area it’s located in as the raw and emotional detail shine through. From the cornfields to the winds, the insular community to the doubt of the police, this is a remote and distant township in every sense of the word.

I like a novel about a lone policeman in a strange and remote town so far removed from anything I personally know, and this more than fits that bill. Wild Thyme and Maiden’s Grove Lake are just two names of places in the book which conjure up a fairytale like place – indeed the policeman in the book did move here for a fresh start but the reality is far from Snow White and more Snow Queen combined with the forest from Hansel and Gretel.

There is a real sense of darkness and menace throughout this book and I hope book three is on its way as I need to ride on back into Wild Thyme sir. (albeit with protective gear on) Yes I do.