All the Beautiful Sinners

Nazareth, Texas

Deputy Sheriff Jim Doe plunges into a renegade manhunt after the town’s sheriff is gunned down. But unbeknownst to him, the suspect—an American Indian—holds chilling connections to the disappearance of Doe’s sister years before. And the closer Doe gets to the fugitive’s trail, the more he realizes that his own involvement in the case is hardly coincidental. A descendant of the Blackfeet Nation himself, Doe keeps getting mistaken for the killer he’s chasing. And when the FBI’s finest three profilers descend on the case, Doe suspects the hunt has only just begun.

But beneath the novel’s pyrotechnic plotting, the deeper psychic cadences of Stephen Graham Jones’s prose take hold. His specific imagery and telling detail coalesce into the literary equivalent of an Edward Hopper painting. But like the other seminal works in the genre (Fight Club, Red Dragon), All The Beautiful Sinners will unnerve you, and it will then send you back to page one to experience its mysteries all over again.

Imagine the laconic Sherman Alexie meeting the bombastic Stephen King on the Texas High Plains. Austin Chronicle

Jones’s writing betrays a huge intelligence, but he embraces the genre’s conventions without sending them up or dumbing them down. Texas Monthly

The book masterfully plays with the serial killer genre, walking a line between convention and invention and delving into the psychology of both killer and detective. The plot is chilling in itself, but Jones’s brisk, clean, visceral prose gives the novel its edgy suspense – Publisher’s Weekly

…it does what crime drama is supposed to do: scare the bejesus out of the reader. Eerie and engrossing, the novel is the sort of thing you have to shake out of your system when you’ve finished, but like a train ride through hell, you can’t get off until it gets to a station — San Antonio Express

the intended cover for the trade paperback (that never happened)

Links: Austin Chronicle | Texas Monthly | MAG | eight years later  | Batman novels  |  Steely Dan Fans | Eight Years Later | Strand Magazine | Contemporary Indigenous Crime Novels | CrimeReads | Tor Nightfire |

carved into a shed wall during a photoshoot (by me)
Author: SGJ