From Amazon.com
"It started with a body, the head of it pretty much gone, the hands skinned." This eerie introduction to Bret Lott's
The Hunt Club sets the tone for this novel of murder, violence, and sinister secrets. The settings are dark and sultry: ramshackle trailers, forgotten burial grounds, and the seedy Hunt Club itself, built on "trash land." Events are witnessed through the eyes of 15-year-old Huger Dillard, smart, precocious, and always at the forefront of some crisis or criminal activity. Huger is also the eyes for his uncle, the owner of the Hunt Club who was left blind from a fire that killed his wife. Huger and "Unc" are unwittingly entangled in a web of murder and deceit, and they must solve this classic whodunit. Assisted by a local cook and her young, deaf daughter, this is a fresh and innovative detective team.
The Hunt Club is a thrill ride all the way, a mix of gloriously grotesque characters, forbidding landscapes, and rotten crimes.
From Library Journal
Lott (Reed's Beach, LJ 9/1/93) unleashes his imagination and displays great versatility as a writer with this, his first thriller. In a dark tale of greed and violence, somewhat reminiscent of Davis Grubb's Night of the Hunter (Kensington, 1992), Lott leads the reader through a harrowing weekend in November in which a blind man and his teenage nephew are targeted for death. Set in the Ashepoo River backwater of South Carolina, the story is told from the perspective of 15-year-old Huger Dillard, who serves as eyes for his uncle, proprietor of a hunt club for wealthy Charlestonians on the family's 2200 acres of swamp and woodland. Wise beyond his years, Huger is nevertheless unprepared to cope with murder, suicide, kidnapping, and a night of being stalked by a pathological killer intent on gaining ownership of the Dillards' seemingly worthless land. A good read with action, suspense, and a hint of Southern folklore.?Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
