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Bryan Gruley

In small towns, you think you know people. You don't.

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quinn

The Accidental Trilogy

March 4, 2012 By quinn

I can’t wait for my readers to explore what’s in The Skeleton Box.

The Skeleton Box was inspired by a true story: the disappearance of a Roman Catholic nun from a parish on Michigan’s Leelenau Peninsula in the early 1900s.

Hundreds of people swept through local swamp and forest land looking in vain for young Sister Mary Janina. A few years later, a woman who had worked at the parish confessed to a priest in Milwaukee that she had murdered Sister Janina and buried her beneath the church.

I first read about the nun’s murder in a collection of true Michigan tales by the late Larry Wakefield, and later in Mardi Link’s splendid book, Isadore’s Secret. Certain images stuck with me and, as with the shoe tree in my previous novel, The Hanging Tree, I had to write about them. Still, The Skeleton Box tells a very different story than the real one that precipitated the longest murder trial in Michigan history.

When I wrote my first novel, Starvation Lake, I didn’t set out to write a trilogy. Heck, I threw away an entire book between the first and second ones. Yet, with The Skeleton Box, I think I’ve completed an accidental trilogy that revolves around the relationship between the protagonist, Gus Carpenter, and his mother, Bea. People who know me might say that in some ways it mirrors the relationship I had with my Mom. In retrospect, they might not be far off.

Filed Under: News

Associated Press

February 24, 2012 By quinn

An author who has mastered the conventions of his genre. Discriminating readers will be anxiously awaiting the third book in this promising series.

Filed Under: Praise

Booklist

February 5, 2012 By quinn

Gruley captures the hardscrabble life of a recession-rocked small town and the deep interrelationships of the inhabitants while delivering complex, intriguing characters caught up in trouble. His take on contemporary journalism is Evelyn Waugh–worthy. Another winner.

Filed Under: Praise, The Hanging Tree

Associated Press

February 5, 2012 By quinn

As with “Starvation Lake” before it, “The Hanging Tree” is an exceptionally well-written novel by an author who has mastered the conventions of his genre.

Filed Under: Praise, The Hanging Tree

Lansing City Pulse

February 5, 2012 By quinn

…a masterpiece of detective fiction, with the right amount of blind alleys that leave the outcome always in doubt. The author, who is the Chicago bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, has topped his first book while capturing the essence of a hockey-crazy Michigan small town.

Filed Under: Praise, The Hanging Tree

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