First Lines Friday... and Taking a Trip to the Upstate of South Carolina

The Hammerhead Chronicles by Scott Gould... Your wife dies and you buy an expensive foreign bicycle, and yes, you know how that sounds, how cold and borderline brutal, how it possesses not even the tiniest speck of compassion, but you have been lusting after a bicycle much longer than she has been dying, and the two eents collide on a Thursday evening in late summer. Call it synchronicity. Call it whatever you want. Except don't call it unfeeling.

Because she isn't really your wife when she passes away. Okay, technically, maybe on paper Peg is. But she is a month and a day from becoming your official ex-wife, what with South Carolina's odd, year-long waiting (contemplating? second-guessing?) period after you separate...

I did a google search the other day to see how many local authors there were near me in the Upstate of South Carolina. I found two authors that stood out... Susan Boyer, who writes the Lowcountry mysteries (the Lowcountry is Charleston, SC and that area) and Scott Gould, who I had never heard of before.

Then I googled Scott Gould and learned he has 6 books under his belt and has won numerous awards for his writing. Then I looked up his books and read a little bit of a few of them. From the small bit of writing I sampled of Scott, I really liked his writing. My library actually had a copy of Strangers to Temptation, Scott Gould's short story collection, which I promptly took out. AND, I bought a copy of The Hammerhead Chronicles so I could have a leisurely story to read of Scott's. Here's the blurb from the publisher about The Hammerhead Chronicles:

On the day Claude slaps down a credit card for an expensive racing bicycle, his soon-to-be-ex-wife passes away. As Claude begins a quest to pedal away from his marriage and his grief, we encounter the Southern eccentrics that orbit his world: his overly independent, rebellious teenage daughter; his foul-mouthed sister-in-law who deftly stalks her husband's mistress; twin, gay bookstore owners who serve the profitable underground Confederacy market out of their "special" back room; the math professor possessing an attic full of rats and a penchant for revenge; a skinny bartender-named for a Marine base-who preaches a suck-it-up philosophy; and Claude's recently deceased wife, observing it all from the Great Beyond, where she is annoyed by the lack of decent weather and by the troubled, tangled lives she left behind.

I love quirky characters and the stories that bring these types of characters alive. And I am really looking forward to reading all of these stories from Scott Gould! 

Would the First Lines of this book make you want to read it?

Hammerhead Chronicles was published by:

 University of North Georgia Press in 2022.