The Hanging Tree

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.

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.

…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.

Enthralling … briskly paced with in-depth character studies, The Hanging Tree surpasses even Starvation Lake.

If Richard Russo, one of the grand chroniclers of the intricacies of small-town American life, decided to write crime fiction, he might produce something like Bryan Gruley’s The Hanging Tree … with portraits of complex, compelling people doing their best, and worst, to make their ways in the world in down-sinking times.