The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne - Softcover

Currie, Ron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593851684 ISBN 13: 9780593851685

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Named a Best Book of the Year by Vulture, BookPage, Publishers Weekly, and Real Simple • A WSJ Best Mystery Book of 2025 • A 2025 NPR Book We Love

"Terrific in-your-face crime story, featuring the unlikeliest drug family you've ever met. It's like the second coming of Elmore Leonard." —Stephen King

“Darkly funny, shocking, and unblinking, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne is a tour de force with a palpable rendering of place and time and unforgettable characters.” —C.J. Box, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Battle Mountain

Your ancestors breathe through you. Sometimes, they call for vengeance.

Babs Dionne, proud Franco-American, doting grandmother, and vicious crime matriarch, rules her small town of Waterville, Maine, with an iron fist. She controls the flow of drugs into Little Canada with the help of her loyal lieutenants, girlfriends since they were teenagers, and her eldest daughter, Lori, a Marine vet struggling with addiction.

When a drug kingpin discovers that his numbers are down in the upper northeast, he sends a malevolent force, known only as The Man, to investigate. At the same time, Babs's youngest daughter, Sis, has gone missing, which doesn't seem at all like a coincidence. In twenty-four hours, Sis will be found dead, and the whole town will seek shelter from Babs’s wrath.

The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne is a crime saga like no other, with a ferocious matriarch at its bruised, beating heart. With sharp wit and profound empathy, award-winning author Ron Currie, delivers an unforgettable novel exploring love, retribution, and the ancestral roots that both nurture and trap us.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ron Currie is the award-winning author of five novels. He has won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the Addison M. Metcalf Award, the Alex Award, and the Pushcart Prize. His books have been translated into fifteen languages, and his short fiction and nonfiction have received recognition in Best American anthologies. He lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches in the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast MFA program.

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Chapter OneJune 30, 2016When did a person's future become locked in? Consider: on this evening, Sis Dionne was still alive, but in twenty-four hours she would be dead, murdered, in fact. Was it possible for a different choice to be made between now and then that would forestall her departure from this life, and the violent dissolution of a family and a neighborhood that followed? Could her mother, Babs, have done something other than what she did? Her older sister, Lori? Maybe, but impossible to know. The bulk of reality remains just beyond the edges of our ability to perceive, alas. God's still not talking and the physicists haven't figured it all out quite yet, so we're left with the same speculation and superstition as always. Here's what we do know: at this point, in this life, in the story about to unfold, Sis would be killed in little more than a day's time, her body burned with utter lack of ceremony and left in a junkyard. Her end could be viewed, on a long enough time line, as the result of innumerable choices stretching back centuries, the clash of armies and ideas, the appreciative glance and fertilized ovum, every ripple and undulation of history even remotely connected to her life, a change to any one of which might have kept her from such a violent demise. But practically speaking, in our lives, we make our choices and things happen as they happen and that, as they say, is that. As such, Sis would soon be dead.Tonight, however, she was still out there somewhere, drawing breath, and it was, instead, her sister Lori who had just died.Lori lay on the floor of the bathroom in a bar called You Know Who's Pub in Waterville, Maine, where her mother, Babs, she of the mind like a shark's mouth, had raised her and Sis. Beside Lori on the floor sat a hypodermic needle, empty, a crust of Lori's blood drying on the tip. Her legs lay scissored and motionless one over the other, spike arm stretched out and already stiffening on the floor in front of her, the sleeve rolled up to her skinny biceps, which was mottled with gray-green bruises, and because she had only just died and because the heart dies before the brain, she was dreaming:A convoy of military trucks rolls along Highway 1 in Wardak Province, Afghanistan. Humvees, stout MRAPs bristling with machine guns and grenade launchers, massive LVSRs like futuristic tractor trailers painted in desert tan. The landscape they move through is impossibly flat and dusty, ringed by distant mountains. The mountaintops are capped in snow, but on the ground here it's hot as Hades, the sun pounding rock and dirt. Nothing lives or moves other than the trucks, which crawl along the blacktop, diesels growling.Lori sits in the driver's seat of the sixth vehicle in the convoy, a 10x10 LVSR loaded with cargo containers. She's dwarfed by the vehicle's massive steering wheel but at ease behind the controls, her hair pulled into a neat ponytail that peeks out beneath her helmet. On her shoulder she wears a staff sergeant's chevron: three stripes up, one down. Next to her sits Sammy Menendez, and as is usually the case-even when he sleeps-Sammy is talking."'Follow the Highway of Death north,'" Sammy says. "'Stop at every bridge, watering hole, horse hitch, and outhouse along the way, so Colonel Hajji can meet with his soldiers-who may or may not be plotting to blow you up. When you get to the end of the road, turn around. Head back the way you came. Try not to get killed.'""Orders are orders," Lori says."Being as my ass belongs to a supply battalion, I'll admit I'm not well-versed in tactical best practices," Sammy says. "All the same, stopping every half an hour in broad daylight in the most dangerous place on earth to babysit a fake colonel does not seem like, you know, the wisest use of personnel and equipment.""We're not escorting Colonel Ahmadi," Lori says. "We're transporting power equipment and food supplies. That Colonel Ahmadi happens to be along for the ride is incidental to our mission.""Right," Sammy says. "So if I get blown up while he gabs at some checkpoint, will I be incidentally dead?""I suppose so," Lori says."Great," Sammy says. "Make sure they put that on my death certificate. It'll be a huge comfort to my mother."Lori smiles and hits the brakes as the vehicles ahead of her slow, then stop altogether."What now?" Sammy groans. His view of the road is blocked by the LVSR directly in front of them, but Lori's got a line of sight to what's happening up ahead."ANA's guarding a bridge. I imagine the colonel's going to dismount and say hello.""Of course he is," Sammy says.Chatter over the radio reveals the real reason they're stopped: cross talk that an IED has been discovered four kilometers up the road by a bomb dog; EOD is deploying now from Bagram via Blackhawk."Better get comfortable," Lori says."Outstanding," Sammy says. He grabs his rifle and reaches into his ruck on the floor of the cab, pulls out a large plastic package of Twizzlers.They get out. Up and down the convoy line, Marines are dismounting, eyeballing the area, checking the ground for any sign it has been disturbed by men. But that's the thing about the land here: it keeps its secrets. Lori doesn't like the look of a set of hills to the right of the road, three hundred meters distant, at the foot of which sits a cluster of mud-brick buildings, but as she comes around the vehicle she says nothing, not wanting to get Sammy riled up.But Sammy doesn't require prompting. "Again," he says, "I'm more or less a glorified supply clerk, but if I were a real Marine I would consider this a very, very bad place to stop.""Not a lot of cover up there," Lori says."Plenty of cover in that village," Sammy says."That's a Hazara settlement," Lori says. "They hate the Taliban more than you do.""Maybe yesterday," Sammy says. "Today, who knows?""Well, now's your chance to improve relations," Lori says. "Here comes the welcoming committee."A dozen boys, who'd been batting around a volleyball when the convoy rolled up, now make their way toward the trucks. Sammy loves these moments, which is why he's never without Twizzlers.Three Blackhawks thump overhead, pointed north. The racket of their rotors breaks the spell, and everyone seems to remember suddenly that nobody can be trusted, not ten-year-old boys, not friendly Marines bearing gifts. The kids retreat to their makeshift volleyball court, clutching handfuls of licorice. Sammy comes back to the front of the LVSR, where Lori's checking a hose on the tire inflation system. It's been acting up without ready explanation, and she's cranky."Are they really going to make us wait for the next three hours while EOD plays Operation?" Sammy asks."Before you get going on another rant, know that (a) I don't like it any more than you do, and (b) there's nothing to be done so I don't want to hear it.""Wow. Aye, aye, Staff Sergeant.""I'm serious, Sammy. If you're so worried, do your job and keep an eye on that ridgeline until word comes through that it's time to move out. And don't forget to hydrate."Half an hour passes in silence, by far the longest Lori has ever known Sammy to stay quiet. She starts to think maybe she's been too hard on him. She plays back the words she said and how she said them and hears her mother, Babs.Lori's stirred from her thoughts by a low whump, like God stamping His foot just beyond the horizon: the familiar sound of matter being suddenly and violently ripped into its constituent parts. Distant, but never far enough, that noise. The concussion unfurls languidly around the valley, echoing in waves off the hills until finally it fades. And then, less than a minute later, the radio gives word-the IED up ahead now cleared, the convoy can be on its way.They mount up, Sammy still silent."You got any of those Twizzlers left?" she asks Sammy."I thought you didn't like licorice," he says."I don't. It's disgusting."They smile at each other across the cab, and the convoy starts rolling. He hands her a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593851684
• ISBN 13: 9780593851685
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 401
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar