Crash Bang Burn

by K. Dawn Goodwin

When Edie, a naive Bible-college dropout from Massachusetts, finds her life derailed in unfamiliar Georgia, she pins her hopes on a sexy Samaritan—a tough, tattooed firefighter named Cross—and follows him deep into the boondocks, where she gets a very different kind of education. All Cross ever wanted was to be a local war hero, but his chance at glory ended in an explosive display of piss-poor judgment. Now, his crumbling marriage to “crazy” Braylee Lewis and his growing pill habit lead Cross to look for an escape—and he finds it in the form of hot little doe-eyed Edie, who is eager to lick his wounds. Braylee’s redneck family didn’t exactly give her the blueprint for domestic bliss, but she vowed to do better when she married Cross, the All-American soldier. Three kids later, their chemistry feels more like a chemical spill and wedlock like a federal sentence. But if she thinks she can just break free—well, she really must be crazy. Told through the eyes of three lovers, Crash Bang Burn is an anti–romance novel; a postmortem on the bro-country anthems about them pretty little blue-eyed girls that slices open the dark underbelly of sex, marriage, and family in the dirty South.

378 pages, Paperback

First published September 16, 2015

Reviews

[Amy Pence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take a ride--in big trucks and ATVs--with three characters entwined by circumstance, sex, and revenge. Goodwin depicts the pull of the down-and-out south and shows the vulnerability in her brash characters. This book is the new: edgy, frank, and often searingly funny. Halfway in and you know the crash, seen the bang, but wait until you read the burn.