Will he continue Les’s practice of taking monthly hush money from a local marijuana grower?ĭivorced for many years, Les is a loner who eats and sleeps by himself and is tormented by the guilt of not having understood his former wife’s depression. Then there’s the matter of breaking in the new sheriff. Out in the backwoods hollows, crystal meth labs have replaced moonshine stills. With just three weeks left before his retirement, Les, the county sheriff, is concerned about the escalating conflict between the owner of a local fishing resort and Gerald Blackwelder, an elderly mountain man suspected of poaching.īut Sheriff Les has other unfinished business, too. Many hundreds of miles to the south, in the lovely but endangered Appalachians of Ron Rash’s superb new novel, brook or speckled trout, as the natives prefer to call them, are becoming scarce. Otherwise, I never heard them say that they’d go fishing with anyone but me. They often told me that they would go brook trout fishing with these three authors. In particular, my dad and my uncle loved Hemingway’s early stories, Faulkner’s novels and Frost’s poems. Brook trout fishing was a nearly sacrosanct tradition in our family.

When I turned 4, my father and my uncle, both teachers, began taking me brook trout fishing in the stream behind our home in the Catskill Mountains.

The Risen by Ron Rash