Winter’s Bone

(Little, Brown, 193 pages)<$>

DANIEL Woodrell never comes close to making best-seller lists; in fact, unless you are part of his small cult following, you probably have never heard of him. But he is one of our finest writers, and it is high time his work found a mass audience.His new novel, Winter’s Bone, is his eighth, and it may be his best yet — an instant classic.

Reviewers have labelled Woodrell’s books, most of them set in his native Ozarks, “country noir”, but they defy categorisation. He has been compared to writers as stylistically diverse as William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler, Flannery O’Conner and Jim Thompson, Ernest Hemmingway and Elmore Leonard.

To that impressive list, let’s add this: His tales are as disturbing as James Ellroy’s, his dialogue as superb as the best of George V. Higgins, his style at once as stark as James M. Cain’s yet as lyrical as James Lee Burke’s.

However, his flawlessly spare, vivid prose resembles none of these masters. Daniel Woodrell is a stunningly original writer.

Winter’s Bone tells the story of 16-year-old Ree Dolly, who selflessly shoulders the burden of caring for her mentally ill mother and her two young brothers when her father, the best crystal meth cooker in the county, goes on the lam.

On the first page, Woodrell introduces her this way:

“Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes, stood bare-armed in a fluttering yellow dress, face to the wind, her cheeks reddening as if smacked and smacked again. She stood tall in combat boots, scarce at the waist but plenty through the arms and shoulders, a body made for loping after needs. She smelled the frosty wet in the looming clouds, thought of her shadowed kitchen and lean cupboard, looked to the scant woodpile, shuddered.”

Break that passage into poetic lines and you can see it for what it is. You can read the entire book as an epic poem — a modern-day Iliad.

Woodrell’s dedicated following is accustomed to such brilliance. We’ve seen it before in Tomato Red, Give Us a Kiss and The Death of Sweet Mister. In fact, his last five novels were selected as New York Times<$> notable books of the year.

Ree’s quest begins when a deputy sheriff ventures up the snowy track to her wretched shack. Her missing father, he warns her, put up their property to post bond. If he doesn’t show soon, Ree, her mom and the boys will be tossed out into the weather.

So Ree goes searching for him down the rutted tracks that pass for roads in these lawless Missouri hills. Her kin, the Dolly clan, warn her to stop looking. The Milton clan does the same, their warnings delivered with menace, and, eventually, worse.

In other hands, these hill people would be portrayed as ignorant hillbillies, or, perhaps, romantic outlaws. But Woodrell lives here, his family’s roots stretching back to the 1840s. In his hands, they are cultural renegades, living outside the law of the land but enforcing a strict code of their own with Old Testament ruthlessness. The first rule: Mind your own business.

It is a rule Ree is too desperate to obey. She persists in her search with a stubborn dignity.

Woodrell tells her story with empathy but without a trace of sentimentality, transforming a simple country girl into one of the most memorable female heroes in modern American fiction.

* * *The Night Gardener

(Little, Brown, 372 pages)

G<$>EORGE Pelecanos’ new novel, The Night Gardener, can be read as a police procedural — hipper but just as good as those of the late, great Ed McBain.But it is also a wise, textured examination of life in urban America, as sophisticated as the best work of Richard Price (Clockers<$>).

Pelecanos, a former bartender and shoe salesman, got off to a shaky start with his first book, A Firing Offense (1992); but he kept at it, growing with each novel until receiving well-deserved critical acclaim for his sixth, King Suckerman (1998). Since then, he’s continued to improve. His last book, Drama City (2005), is a masterpiece of American crime fiction; The Night Gardener is even better.

The plot revolves around the murder of a teenage boy named Asa, found shot in the left temple in a community garden in Washington, DC, the city where Pelecanos grew up and the setting for all of his novels. Detectives recognise an eerie resemblance to a string of 20-year-old, unsolved murders. For one thing, all the young victims had been dumped in community gardens. For another, they all had names, like Asa, spelled the same forward and backward.

The hunt for the killer unfolds amid a tangle of sub-plots involving drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes. But it’s not the crimes and the crime-solving that interest Pelecanos so much as it is the cops, the criminals and the victims — the way they live and the choices they make in a racially divided, often violent city.

There’s T.C. Cook, a retired police detective who has never been able to shake his obsession with the serial murders he could never solve. There’s Dan Holiday, who saw police work as his calling, washed out, and longs for a way to get back into the action.

There’s Gus Ramone, a white police detective who says the work is just a job but is darned good at it — and who, as the devoted husband of a black woman and father of mixed race children, faces a daily struggle with racism and hypocrisy:

“It was hard for him to sit on his hands when his son got slighted due to his blackness or the way he dressed. Because what could you do, put every convenience store clerk up against a wall who had told his son to get out the shop, or threaten every township-quality cop who tried to bust Diego down?”

Such thumbnails can’t begin to capture the way Pelecanos develops these characters — and a dozen more — into complete human beings, gradually allowing us to know them better as the action unfolds. Each has a rich life outside of work that is only alluded to with some, but fully developed with others.

In fact, some of the most memorable moments in the novel have nothing to do with the investigation: Watch the ex-cop, Holiday, resentfully tugging on the chauffeur hat he must wear for his limousine business; or Ramone in tender yet unsentimental private moments with his teenage son, Diego.

After the parade of macho loners and workaholics other crime writers have fed us, it’s a special treat to meet Ramone, a working- class hero who puts his family ahead of his job.

You’ll read The Night Gardner <$>not to find out whether he and the other detectives will solve the crime, but to learn how the case will change their lives.