Cry Me a River has this wicked and lonely way with its language that creeps along, sneaking up on a reader. Yet once I'd sat down with it, I found myself quaking with mirth. The lawman narrator takes his own sweet and backward time recounting a Southern town's most recent and notable murder, along the way managing to unearth truths about how ridiculous, how brutal, how gentle, and how salacious people are, as they devour their romance novels, as they poke through the contents of a dead man's wallet, or as they sit rocking side by side on a rickety porch, saying nothing whatsoever at all.

Andrea Sandke