Crimes in Southern Indiana

A blistering and fearless slice of gut-wrenching hill-billy noir from a superb new talent

Take American gothic + Tarantino + 1 cup of human blood. Liquidise in blender. Result: The great stories of Frank Bill

An astonishingly powerful debut book...It’s a brutal rabbit punch of a book – a shotgun blast in the chest of literature and a crystal meth hit to the reader…Remarkable.

Amazing collection…It’s all overshadowed by a Southern Indiana landscape that proves eerily ideal for guns, hunting, secret meth labs and the casual infliction of terrible pain. 270 pages of gripping and harrowing shitloads of it.

There’s a whiskey-gargling swagger to [Frank Bill’s] Cormac McCarthy-style prose, and each noir tale is savagely addictive.

Good Lord, where in the hell did this guy come from? Hits as hard as an ax handle to the side of the head after you've snorted a nose full of battery acid and eaten a live rattlesnake for breakfast. Seriously, I'm warning you in advance: take your heart medication and strap yourself to your bar stool for one of the wildest damn rides you're ever going to take inside a book.

Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff

Dark, grim, and achingly beautiful. Frank Bill is one of the most original and compelling voices in this new generation of crime writers.

Some serious hillbilly-noir that had my ears ringing by the end. Open the first page... and duck.

Craig Clevenger, author of The Contortionist’s Handbook

Frank Bill lives and writes in Southern Indiana. CRIMES IN SOUTHERN INDIANA is his first book.

Welcome to Heartland America circa right about now, when the union jobs and family farms that kept the white on the picket fences have given way to meth labs, backwoods gunrunners, and bare-knuckle brawling. Frank Bill's Southern Indiana is haunted by a deep, abiding sense of place, and his people are men and women pressed to the brink - and beyond. They are survivors, and in Frank Bill's hands, their stories bristle with noir energy.

Frank Bill

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Twenty fighters. One wire-fence ring. One man left standing. 
 
The Donnybrook is a three-day bare-knuckle tournament held on a thousand-acre plot out in the sticks of southern Indiana. Twenty fighters unleash hell until only one man is left standing while a rowdy festival of onlookers – drunk and high on whatever’s on offer – bet on the outcome. 
 
Jarhead is a desperate man who’d do just about anything to feed his children. He’s also the toughest fighter in southeastern Kentucky, and he’s convinced that his ticket to a better life is one last fight with a cash prize so big it’ll solve all his problems. Meanwhile, there’s Chainsaw Angus – an undefeated master fighter who isn’t too keen on getting his face punched anymore, so he and his sister, Liz, have started cooking meth. And they get in deep. So deep that Liz wants it all for herself, and she might just be ready to kill her brother for it. 
 
As we travel through the backwoods on the way to the Donnybrook, we meet a cast of nasty, ruined characters driven to all sorts of evil, all in the name of getting their fix – drugs, violence, sex, money, honour. Donnybrook is exactly the fearless, explosive, amphetamine-fuelled journey you’d expect from Frank Bill’s first novel . . . and then some.

Frank Bill

Donnybrook

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