Currie The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne

"One of the best crime novels of 2025"
Main
ISBN: 978-1-80546-390-0
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

'A tour de force' Guardian 'A bloody yet surprisingly warm-hearted spin on The Godfather. Great stuff' The Times, Best Thrillers of 2025 Babs Dionne, doting grandmother and vicious crime matriarch, rules her small town with an iron fist. She controls the flow of drugs into its borders with the help of her loyal lieutenants, girlfriends since they were teenagers, and her eldest daughter, Lori, a former soldier struggling with addiction. When a drug cartel discovers that its numbers are down in the area, they send 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...

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. As a screenwriter he worked most recently on the Apple TV+ series Extrapolations and has developed projects with AMC Studios, Amblin Television, and ITV America. He lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches in the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast MFA program.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Currie, Ron

Leseproben

1668 – 1968

Think of generations as a chain, one link leading to and binding the next, and all of them—even the most distant—forever connected and inseparable. Forget about ancestors the way we usually talk of them, as if they are somehow less real than we are. Those who came before are not footnotes to the Very Important Life you’re living now. They are real people, and still. They breathe through you. They bleed and cry and dance, pull their rotten teeth with pliers sanitized in bootleg rye. They plow fields and pray for rain. They sing their children songs at night: They clutch their sheets in fever. They run great machines that make cloth and paper for the whole world. They fight in wars. They tell lies. They sit awake long after everyone they love has fallen asleep, a hand-rolled cigarette pinched between their fingers, waiting in desperation for first light, eternally.

Their ghosts are all around you, clamoring to be seen and heard, like Marley rattling his chains. And like Marley, they have things to teach you.

So: Think of them all as yourself. A single entity, spanning centuries. Finding its current but by no means final iteration in you.

Once, for example, you were a woman named Evangeline LeNormand: Parisian orphan, ward of the church, survivor, and cynic. You came to Nouvelle-France in 1667. Many of the girls who traveled with you believed the promises the priests had made—handsome husbands of noble birth, the riches of the New World theirs for the asking. But you knew better.

The boat smelled of shit and wet rot, rolling for months over endless waves. After the first week both passengers and crew began to get sick, clawing at rashes and grabbing their skulls in agony. You waited your turn, watching as ten of the other died, their corpses wrapped in cotton cloth, given a box-check blessing, and dropped overboard. A dozen others went insane with fever. Yet you somehow remained healthy, dumb luck—though whether this luck was good or bad, considering how things would turn out, was debatable. By the time the ship docked in Quebec there were twenty-one girls left, each still somehow convinced that fortune smiled broadly as they promenaded off the ship. Then there was you, pulling up the rear and dragging your chest through the mud, trusting no one to carry it but yourself.

The other girls went fast, married and pregnant and drying beaver skins before you could say . In a place where men outnumbered women eight to one and winter lasted six months of the year, it was inevitable someone would claim you. His name was Joshua Currey. He traded tools for furs with the Mi’kmaq, and because he was Scottish you did not understand him and he did not understand you. As was his right, he took your trousseau and the fifty livres and when the money was gone he left you in the fall of 1673 with two daughters, Dominique and Madeleine.

Ahundred years after that you were Madeleine’s great-grand-daughter Aimee, your hair an unruly black corona just like the women before you, and as with the women before you, men were drawn by that hair and the desire to tame it. You did your part to resist the British by cutting two Redcoats who thought they could take what they wanted from a whore without paying.

English-speaking Protestants ruled now, people who hid their prejudice and evil intent behind proper manners. The lies began anew, the same lies they’d told the Acadians before burning their farms and scattering them to the wind, lies they would tell again and again to all you wild-haired Frenchwomen still to come: You can keep your Pope. You can keep your customs and your language. We will not kill you. We will not drive you out. We will not herd you into ghettos and let diseases burn. We will treat you as equals. We will not tar and feather your priests. We will not rape you. We will not, for generation upon generation, make your lives miserable, and then harrumph at society dinners when you behave as miserable people do.

And so, after two hundred more years of lies, you were Barbara Levesque, the eighth-great-granddaughter of Evangeline LeNormand. Everyone called you Babs. The year was 1968, and at fourteen years old you had a head of hair as black and round and gravitydefying as Evangeline’s had been centuries before. You lived in Waterville, Maine, and had never known the Quebec of your forebears, because your grandfather Leonard Levesque had traveled by train to Waterville in 1918, braving the Spanish flu and the Klan to work at the Hollingsworth & Whitney paper mill. Leonard and his ten sons, including your father, André, all worked at H&W, and between them had lost four fingers, a right hand at the wrist, and most of a right foot to the mill’s pitiless, grinding machinery. That accounting did not include your father’s youngest brother, Paul, who was crushed from the knees down when a picker pulled the wrong stick from a pile of spruce logs in the H&W lumberyard and the whole thing came rolling down in an avalanche of timber. Paul had been paid two thousand dollars apiece for his legs, and used the money to open Levesque’s Variety on the corner of Water and King Streets in the heart of Little Canada, the low-lying neighborhood that always flooded first when the river jumped its banks in spring, the neighborhood where French was spoken on every street corner, the neighborhood you called home.

That February your brother Jean had traveled home from Da Nang in a flag-draped casket, the first of your family buried in Waterville’s Saint Francis cemetery, which was not its own cemetery at all but just a back lot in the larger Protestant graveyard. The Catholics were granted half a dozen acres of crabgrass at the edge of a hill where people dumped their trash, and from Jean’s grave that summer, you could see one rusty corner of a discarded washing machine poking up over the crest of the hill. That April, Martin Luther King had been shot in the head, like your brother, and now it was June, and Bobby Kennedy had just been shot in the head, too, and though the country heaved and burned, you were preoccupied only with your new summer job, that of minding the register at Levesque’s Variety from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon each weekday.

A reality of life for Franco business owners like your uncle was that the Waterville police took whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, a plain, long-standing fact about which no one complained if they were smart. Beat cops carried the keys to every store, hotel, and car dealership in town, ostensibly to do inspections and investigate reports of break-ins—except more often than not, they were the ones breaking in. Their larceny ran the gamut from petty to profound. Sandwiches from LaCroix’s Hamburger Haven, mary janes for their daughters from LaVerdiere’s Clothing. The past two years a rumor had circulated that a shift sergeant had opened the gate at Boucher Marine and driven off with a brand-new Carver runabout, 225-horse inboard with sleeper cabin, a gossip-bold heist even for the cretins of the Waterville PD. And gossip people did. Waterville was corrupt as shit and oddly proud of the fact; being known as a hub of scandal and intrigue in a landscape of homogeneous little mill towns carried, after all, a certain cachet.

Two pairs of cops patrolled Little Canada through the week, and both came regularly into Levesque’s while you worked the counter. Mondays and Thursdays brought Jimmy Hamlin, thin and ashen with a nose like an eagle’s beak, and Kevin Smyth, whose belly muffled the jangling of his utility belt. On Mondays they each took a carton of Pall Malls, and on Thursdays Jimmy took another carton for the weekend, while Kevin helped himself to Banana Flip cakes and Pop-Tarts, which he ate straight from the box as he considered other items he might steal, littering your uncle’s floor with crumbs.

“,” your uncle Paul told you. He knew your soul, and he didn’t want any trouble. “Smile like they’re doing you a favor. Pop-Tarts don’t cost anything.”

But you couldn’t even muster a smile for your uncle, let alone the men who stole from him. All you could think of was a line from that had burned itself into your brain the previous semester: “O calm, dishonorable, vile submission.” You hadn’t understood, at the time, why the line stood out to you as though lit in neon, but now you realized that Mercutio could have been talking about your uncle, your whole family, the entirety of Little Canada, where people anglicized their names and played by the rules of a rigged game and accepted broad-daylight theft as simply the cost of doing business. You’d been watching them submit your whole life, and “dishonorable” and “vile” barely covered it. These men stole from a cripple. Their fathers sat on the draft board that had sent your brother to his death. And now you were supposed to smile at them? You would sooner slit your own throat. Or one of theirs.

To that end, by July you were keeping your brother’s paratrooper knife under the counter, being sure to scoop it up each day at five minutes to two, just before your uncle limped in on his wooden legs and took over the register.

Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays brought the worse pair, the...