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Dirt: An American Campaign
A grieving you man makes off with the body of his dead bride and imperils his father's presidential campaign.
292 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2008
14 people want to read
About the author
Mark Laflamme
11 books30 followersMark is a crime reporter and columnist at the Sun Journal in Lewiston, Maine. He is also the author of the new collection "Box of Lies" and the novels "Dirt: An American Campaign," "The Pink Room," "Vegetation," and "Asterisk: Red Sox 2086."
Mark stays up until dawn and sleeps until noon. He takes Halloween off each year and rides a dual sport motorcycle. He proposed to his wife, Corey, in a pumpkin patch and then whisked her off to Salem, Mass. for a honeymoon.
Shockingly, he is still married.
Visit his website
Find Mark on Facebook
Kindle Books
Mark stays up until dawn and sleeps until noon. He takes Halloween off each year and rides a dual sport motorcycle. He proposed to his wife, Corey, in a pumpkin patch and then whisked her off to Salem, Mass. for a honeymoon.
Shockingly, he is still married.
Visit his website
Find Mark on Facebook
Kindle Books
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 23, 2025
He said to his wife, "I will never let you go"!
Calvin Cotton is grieving over the death of his soul-mate - not a mere spouse but rather a second half without whom Calvin cannot survive. Calvin's emotional struggle is so overwhelming that he is pushed to the very edge of sanity. He enters his wife's crypt, opens the coffin in which she has been laid to rest mere days earlier and disappears, taking her body with him on an eerie road trip to some of their favourite destinations where they had shared so much love and pleasure during their brief marriage!
But Calvin is much more than just a disturbed young man struggling with overpowering grief and mental turmoil. He's also the son of Governor Frank Cotton, currently slugging it out on the hustings looking to win the Republican Party's nomination as their candidate for the upcoming presidential elections. Frank Cotton and his slick campaign manager, Gary Orp, are only too aware that his candidacy would never withstand the scandal that would erupt if his son's actions were to surface in the media. They hire Thomas Cashman, a black ops mercenary whose past is clearly very checkered and whose own closet is not short of secrets and buried skeletons, to track down Calvin and take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that a once-buried wife remains buried and the story of his son's illness never sees the light of day!
DIRT: AN AMERICAN CAMPAIGN is a chilling horror story that deals with the offbeat topic of necrophilia. But surprisingly, it also informs and takes a mature, adult approach to providing an explanation and helping the reader to understand the possible psychological underpinnings of such a bizarre neurosis. DIRT is also an extraordinarily fast-paced thriller and a scathing indictment of the American political system and its propensity to focus on sleaze, dirt, scandal and negativity. Taking a page from the James Patterson school of thriller writing, Laflamme's ultra-short, high speed chapters grip a reader by the throat and won't let go. This one will keep you awake until the wee hours!
And that explosive twist in the ending ... oh my! Just when you thought the story was winding down, Laflamme's brilliant ending unwinds it all and the dénouement clearly becomes the beginning of an as yet untold story that will give you a very deep down case of the shivers.
Highly recommended.
Paul Weiss
Calvin Cotton is grieving over the death of his soul-mate - not a mere spouse but rather a second half without whom Calvin cannot survive. Calvin's emotional struggle is so overwhelming that he is pushed to the very edge of sanity. He enters his wife's crypt, opens the coffin in which she has been laid to rest mere days earlier and disappears, taking her body with him on an eerie road trip to some of their favourite destinations where they had shared so much love and pleasure during their brief marriage!
But Calvin is much more than just a disturbed young man struggling with overpowering grief and mental turmoil. He's also the son of Governor Frank Cotton, currently slugging it out on the hustings looking to win the Republican Party's nomination as their candidate for the upcoming presidential elections. Frank Cotton and his slick campaign manager, Gary Orp, are only too aware that his candidacy would never withstand the scandal that would erupt if his son's actions were to surface in the media. They hire Thomas Cashman, a black ops mercenary whose past is clearly very checkered and whose own closet is not short of secrets and buried skeletons, to track down Calvin and take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that a once-buried wife remains buried and the story of his son's illness never sees the light of day!
DIRT: AN AMERICAN CAMPAIGN is a chilling horror story that deals with the offbeat topic of necrophilia. But surprisingly, it also informs and takes a mature, adult approach to providing an explanation and helping the reader to understand the possible psychological underpinnings of such a bizarre neurosis. DIRT is also an extraordinarily fast-paced thriller and a scathing indictment of the American political system and its propensity to focus on sleaze, dirt, scandal and negativity. Taking a page from the James Patterson school of thriller writing, Laflamme's ultra-short, high speed chapters grip a reader by the throat and won't let go. This one will keep you awake until the wee hours!
And that explosive twist in the ending ... oh my! Just when you thought the story was winding down, Laflamme's brilliant ending unwinds it all and the dénouement clearly becomes the beginning of an as yet untold story that will give you a very deep down case of the shivers.
Highly recommended.
Paul Weiss
July 18, 2013
Holy crap on a campaign plane.
What a great story. Reminds me of a leaner version of Lansdale without the jokiness and folksiness.
Highly recommend.
4 1/2 stars
What a great story. Reminds me of a leaner version of Lansdale without the jokiness and folksiness.
Highly recommend.
4 1/2 stars
May 1, 2009
Dirt: An American Campaign is a high engery, fast paced novel about grief, personal connection, and political corruption. Governor and Presidential candidate Frank Cotton (no relation to the Frank Cotton in Hellraiser, of course) is in a peculiar situation just at the dawn of his potential election as Republican candidate for the Presidential office. Mr. Cotton is not quite topping the polls and is having trouble with his son Calvin, whose wife just recently passed away. You see, Calvin stole the corpse of his wife and took off with it. What a scandal that would make for the Presidential hopeful.
Enter Thomas Cashman, an ex-military man and CIA agent who is sent on a mission by the Cotton administration to stop Calvin before the press and public get wind of the Cotton family grave robbery. Cashman is just the kind of guy I like-- humorous and down to earth, but without pretense and willing to do what needs in order to be done to be successful at his job. To help get into the mind of Calvin, to better understand and predict him, Cashman employs the help of an alcoholic ex-writer named Billy Baylor. Baylor is somewhat of an expert in what would make a seemingly normal man do something so grotesque because that was the sort of thing that he wrote about before losing his wife and daughter in a car accident.
There is, in fact, a large list of characters: a small time reporter, an environmentalist lawyer, a cemetery attendant, numerous Presidential hopefuls, whole political administrative teams, two news reporters hot on the trail of Calvin, and roadside scoundrels. What connects them is politics, protecting and exposing people, or just the need to seek self gain. There is little difference between the politicians who take joy in destroying their rival’s life and the bullying bikers in the grocery store parking lot.
Every chapter is short, giving a sense of immediacy to the novel. Though the chapters are short in length, I do not feel as if the book is lacking in detail or story. LaFlamme manages to say it all and say it wonderfully within his tightly packed sections. The way that the book flips from one person to the next gives the story a fast pace that made it even harder for me to put the book down at the end of the night.
It was difficult for me to find a ‘good guy’ in this novel, but it was likewise just as hard for me to find a ‘bad guy’. The characters in Dirt are simply people, each trying to get by, neither good nor evil. Everyone has a secret, something dirty in their past. When all of the dirt starts to come out, no one can stop it. No one is left unexposed.
I can almost guarantee with total certainty that you will not see the ending of Dirt coming. LaFlamme throws one twist at you before delivering the final dizzying punch.
Enter Thomas Cashman, an ex-military man and CIA agent who is sent on a mission by the Cotton administration to stop Calvin before the press and public get wind of the Cotton family grave robbery. Cashman is just the kind of guy I like-- humorous and down to earth, but without pretense and willing to do what needs in order to be done to be successful at his job. To help get into the mind of Calvin, to better understand and predict him, Cashman employs the help of an alcoholic ex-writer named Billy Baylor. Baylor is somewhat of an expert in what would make a seemingly normal man do something so grotesque because that was the sort of thing that he wrote about before losing his wife and daughter in a car accident.
There is, in fact, a large list of characters: a small time reporter, an environmentalist lawyer, a cemetery attendant, numerous Presidential hopefuls, whole political administrative teams, two news reporters hot on the trail of Calvin, and roadside scoundrels. What connects them is politics, protecting and exposing people, or just the need to seek self gain. There is little difference between the politicians who take joy in destroying their rival’s life and the bullying bikers in the grocery store parking lot.
Every chapter is short, giving a sense of immediacy to the novel. Though the chapters are short in length, I do not feel as if the book is lacking in detail or story. LaFlamme manages to say it all and say it wonderfully within his tightly packed sections. The way that the book flips from one person to the next gives the story a fast pace that made it even harder for me to put the book down at the end of the night.
It was difficult for me to find a ‘good guy’ in this novel, but it was likewise just as hard for me to find a ‘bad guy’. The characters in Dirt are simply people, each trying to get by, neither good nor evil. Everyone has a secret, something dirty in their past. When all of the dirt starts to come out, no one can stop it. No one is left unexposed.
I can almost guarantee with total certainty that you will not see the ending of Dirt coming. LaFlamme throws one twist at you before delivering the final dizzying punch.
December 23, 2008
In the middle his bid for the presidency, the governor of Maine might have his campaign undone when his son digs robs the grave of his recently departed wife. Dirt: An American Campaign by Mark LaFlamme tries to track all fallout from Calvin Cotton's desperate act.
So far the reviews for Dirt have been positive but I'm going to have to be the dissenting voice. The first six pages, where Calvin enters the tomb and grabs his wife's corpse are riveting. The next fifty or so pages where word leaks out and the experts try to sort out what happened and what will happen is pretty good. The discussion of what will happen to the body is graphic, disgusting and interesting.
By the halfway point there are so many different parties all wanting a piece of the "dirt", the men tracking Calvin, the reporters from NEWZ looking for a scoop, the governor and his campaign trying to hush everything up, that Calvin's story gets lost in the scrimmage. Calvin is the only character who interested me and I never really got a chance to get inside his head.
By the time the book wraps everything up the explanation for Calvin's actions are tied to a ridiculous and unbelievable cliche worthy of a soap opera. I'm not going to tell you what that twist is. You might actually be in the mood for a dumb twist. The book had far more potential and just failed to live up to it.
So far the reviews for Dirt have been positive but I'm going to have to be the dissenting voice. The first six pages, where Calvin enters the tomb and grabs his wife's corpse are riveting. The next fifty or so pages where word leaks out and the experts try to sort out what happened and what will happen is pretty good. The discussion of what will happen to the body is graphic, disgusting and interesting.
By the halfway point there are so many different parties all wanting a piece of the "dirt", the men tracking Calvin, the reporters from NEWZ looking for a scoop, the governor and his campaign trying to hush everything up, that Calvin's story gets lost in the scrimmage. Calvin is the only character who interested me and I never really got a chance to get inside his head.
By the time the book wraps everything up the explanation for Calvin's actions are tied to a ridiculous and unbelievable cliche worthy of a soap opera. I'm not going to tell you what that twist is. You might actually be in the mood for a dumb twist. The book had far more potential and just failed to live up to it.
October 10, 2008
If you like a little mystery amidst political shenanigans, then this is the book for you.
William Baylor is an author with his best days behind him or so it would seem. Since losing his wife and daughter, he's become a drunk, content to hold down a stool in the local bar. Until he meets Thomas Cashman, who brings him into the presidential campaign of one Governor Frank Cotton, a man with a few secrets buried in his past. And Cotton knows how to bury secrets.
The governor's son has just lost his wife to cancer. He steals the body and it's up to Thomas Cashman, with the reluctant aid of William Baylor, to find the son and his rotting wife before the news blows the lid off the campaign.
The twists and turns in this plot are pleasantly unexpected. The outcome is wholly surprising.
William Baylor is an author with his best days behind him or so it would seem. Since losing his wife and daughter, he's become a drunk, content to hold down a stool in the local bar. Until he meets Thomas Cashman, who brings him into the presidential campaign of one Governor Frank Cotton, a man with a few secrets buried in his past. And Cotton knows how to bury secrets.
The governor's son has just lost his wife to cancer. He steals the body and it's up to Thomas Cashman, with the reluctant aid of William Baylor, to find the son and his rotting wife before the news blows the lid off the campaign.
The twists and turns in this plot are pleasantly unexpected. The outcome is wholly surprising.
June 19, 2011
My first sampling of Mark LaFlamme's work was time well-spent.
With thoroughly fleshed out characters, intriguing sub-plots, and twists you never saw coming, "Dirt" holds the suspense from the first pages to very end.
A bizarre chain of events involving a love more powerful than death, and the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of American politics, are just the tip of the iceberg.
If you enjoy delving into human psyche, this book will not disappoint. I would not recommend it for the squeamish.
With thoroughly fleshed out characters, intriguing sub-plots, and twists you never saw coming, "Dirt" holds the suspense from the first pages to very end.
A bizarre chain of events involving a love more powerful than death, and the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of American politics, are just the tip of the iceberg.
If you enjoy delving into human psyche, this book will not disappoint. I would not recommend it for the squeamish.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews