Bruce Holbert, author of 'Lonesome Animals'

In Lonesome Animals , Russell Strawl, a tormented former lawman, is called out of retirement to hunt a serial killer with a sense of the macabre, who has been leaving elaborately carved bodies of Native Americans across three counties. As the pursuit ensues, Strawl’s own dark and violent history weaves itself into the hunt, shedding light on the remains of his broken family: one wife taken by the river, one by his own hand; an adopted Native American son who fancies himself a Catholic prophet; and a daughter, whose temerity and stoicism contrast against the romantic notions of how the West was won.

In the vein of True Grit and Blood Meridian , Lonesome Animals is a western novel reinvented, and a detective story catered to the West. It contemplates the nature of story and heroism in the face of a collapsing ethos‚ not only of Native American culture, but also of the first wave of white men who, through the battle against the geography and its indigenous people, guaranteed their own destruction. But it is also about one man’s urgent, elegiac search for justice amidst the craven acts committed on the edges of civilization.

Bruce Holbert is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, where he assisted in editing The Iowa Review and held a Teaching Writing Fellowship.  His fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review , Hotel Amerika , Other Voices, The Antioch Review , Crab Creek Review , The Spokesman Review , The West Wind Review , Cairn , RiverLit and has one annual awards from the Tampa Tribune Quarterly and The Inlander .  His non-fiction has appeared in The New Orleans Review , The Spokesman Review and The Daily Iowan, and his poetry in RiverLit .  He recently co-authored, with his wife, Signed, Your Student (Kaplan Press) a collection of remembrances of influential teachers recounted by prominent Americans.  His novel Lonesome Animals was released May of 2012 by Counterpoint Press.