Post Facto

THE BOOK:  POST FACTO

PUBLISHED IN:   2018

THE AUTHOR:   Darryl Wimberley.

THE EDITORS:  Judith and Martin Shepard.

THE PUBLISHER:  The Permanent Press

SUMMARY:  In the wake of the 2016 presidential contest, Clara Buchanan, a long-time journalist at the Boston Globe, is forced into an early retirement in a post-facto world. “Real news?  Fake news? When did things get so slippery?” she grouses.  It doesn’t take long for Clara Sue to unearth one stable fact, which is that over-the-hill journalists are largely out of work. The Florida native and Peabody nominee returns to her rural hometown in Florida’s Big Bend to take over the town’s only newspaper where Clara is reminded that a big-city reporter’s opinions cannot compete with football, family reunions or the Future Farmers of America. But the usual copy at The Clarion changes when a lucrative federal contract to renovate the local high school pits the town heavies Hiram and Roscoe Lamb against their “simple” stepbrother Butch McCray. Butch’s tiny store on its half-acre lot is the single obstacle between the Lamb brothers and a lucrative payday. Clara Buchanan decides to investigate the dispute over land and property which has bedeviled Butch’s life with his stepbrothers, a story that gets complicated when Hiram Lamb is found dead on property that used to belong to Butch’s long-deceased mother.  Was Hiram’s death accidental, as the local sheriff and coroner insist?  Clara’s investigation into the present inevitably involves the past history between the Lambs and the McCrays and her confidence to distinguish fact from fiction erodes when her own investigation becomes guided or influenced by phenomenae that she can neither discount nor explain.

THE BACK STORY:   There was a time when people with wildly different political orientations could at least agree about the weather. What happens when facts can simply be dismissed if they are inconvenient? What gate-keeper can possibly fill that gap?

WHY THIS TITLE:   Post Facto…  It is frightening to me that verifiable realities at any level of discourse have become fungible.  I actually wrote the manuscript for this novel well before “fake news” became common parlance, but the title fits to a T.

WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT:  Aside from the thematic lens, It seems to me that fiction which actually takes working class people and their concerns as its center is hard to find—and that has not always been the case in American literature.  Luminaries like William Faulkner and Willa Cather and Mark Twain found grist for their mills in rural cultures. Most of my work is set in Florida’s Big Bend, a region that is very rural, very conservative—and very interesting.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

AUTHOR PROFILE:  For a highly sanitized bio and reviews, see – darrylwimberley.com.

Darryl Wimberley is a Florida native now living in austin. Some titles below:

   A Tinker’s Damn,  Foreword Reviews’ Book of the Year/ Literary Fiction, 2001

   The King of Colored Town, The Willie Morris Award for Fiction, 2007

  Paul Bunyan,  Book of the Year/General Fiction,  INDIEFAB Awards, 2015

 A Seeping Wound,  Winner, Goethe Award for Women’s Historic Fiction, 2016

AUTHOR COMMENTS:  Thanks to Darrell and all who take an interest in Post Facto. It’s nice to be a snowflake in this blizzard!

SAMPLE CHAPTER: This links to sample pages in Amazon Kindle.

www.amazon.com/Post-Facto-Darryl-imberley/dp/157962555X#reader_B07PV3R2YP

LOCAL OUTLETS:   Book People, Barnes ‘n Noble

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Amazon

PRICE: Amazon is cheapest, I think.

CONTACT THE AUTHOR:   adarrylw@gmail.com