Smonk and the townspeople in a way she could never imagine. She eventually stumbles upon Old Texas, where she is fated to E. Pursued by a posse of unlikely vigilantes, Evavangeline boats upriver and then wends through the dust and ruined crops, forced along the way to confront her own clouded past. A case of mistaken identity plunges her into the wild sugarcane country between the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers, land suffering from the worst drought in a hundred years and plagued by rabies. Smonk is also the story of Evavangeline, a fifteen year old prostitute quick to pull a trigger or cork. Thus begins the highly anticipated new novel from Tom Franklin, acclaimed author of Hell at the Breech and Poachers. At last the desperate citizens of the town, themselves harboring a terrible secret, put Smonk on trial, with disastrous and shocking results. Every Saturday night for a year he’s been riding his mule into Old Texas, destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men& 8212all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45 70 caliber over and under rifle. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty and goitered, Smonk is also an expert with explosives and knives. It’s 1911 and the secluded southwestern Alabama town of Old Texas has been besieged by a scabrous and malevolent character called E. It is a mesmerizing and unforgettable display of talent by a writer of immeasurable gifts. Based on incidents that occurred a few miles from the author’s childhood home, Hell at the Breech chronicles the dark events of dark days, events that lead the people involved to discover their capacity for good, for evil, or for both.

Caught in the maelstrom of the Mitcham War are four people: the county’s aging sheriff, sympathetic to both sides the widowed midwife who delivered nearly every member of Hell at the Breech a ruthless detective who wages his own private war against the gang and a young store clerk harboring a terrible secret. The hooded members of this gang wage a bloody year long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre, where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty. Seeking retribution, his outraged friends mostly poor cotton farmers form a secret society, Hell at the Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe are responsible.

In 1897, in the rural southwestern area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered.

Hell at the breech tom franklin