Fateful Mornings: A Henry Farrell Novel (The Henry Farrell Series, 2) - Softcover

Tom Bouman’s first Henry Farrell novel, Dry Bones in the Valley, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lives in upstate New York.

“Fateful Mornings is a haunting dissection of the broken heart of America.”
- Val McDermid

“Leisurely but hard-edged.... Officer Farrell, who thinks a lot but speaks so little... proves to be excellent company.”
- Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal

“Fateful Mornings is terrific reading, a keeper that you’ll want to read at least twice and maybe even more frequently. You’ll wish that everything was this good.”
- Joe Hartlaub, Book Reporter

“You would be hard-pressed to find a finer new series than Tom Bouman’s Henry Farrell novels because of the complexity of the plots or the richness of the characters, but what it really comes down to is just damn good writing.”
- Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire novels, the basis for the Netflix series Longmire

“Henry Farrell casts an eye both dry and weary. What he sees is a people no less troubled than their rust-belt landscape: drug addicts and drug dealers, drunks and grifters. In Wild Thyme, vice and virtue seem locked in an epic bar brawl of astonishingly high stakes, where the losers keep their money and the winners keep their souls.”
- Thomas H. Cook, Edgar Award–winning author of The Chatham School Affair

“Fateful Mornings is that long sought-after gem, the place where the literary meets the crime novel in beautiful symmetry. Henry Farrell is an existential everyman, as clueless as the rest of us about life’s meaning, and his so very human stumbling in search of the elusive truths is one of the many beauties of this fine novel.”
- William Kent Krueger, New York Times best-selling author of the Cork O’Connor series and Ordinary Grace

“My father always said that you can judge people by the way they keep their tools: clean and sharp or soiled and soft. Tom Bouman’s tools―the words he uses to make Fateful Mornings―cut straight and true, in this riveting mystery about a good man caught in the ruined Eden of rural America.”
- Julia Keller, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sorrow Road

“An uncommonly intelligent whodunit, haunted by the presence of an unforgettable villain who slinks through the pages with the lubricious evil of Cape Fear’s Max Cady. With meditations on folk music, ornithology, and the art of timber-framing, Fateful Mornings is the kind of novel that feels more like a porch-sitting conversation with an old friend. Tom Bouman is my new favorite mystery writer.”
- Nickolas Butler, internationally best-selling author of Shotgun Lovesongs, Beneath the Bonfire, and The Hearts of Men

“More than a mystery, Fateful Mornings is a portrait of the rusted pocket of northeastern Pennsylvania that Henry Farrell calls home. Bouman’s tender portrait of a widower remaking his life infuses his crime fiction with a level of intimacy that is both rare and winning. I was happy to ride shotgun with Henry Farrell again.”
- Attica Locke, author of Black Water Rising and The Cutting Season

“Fateful Mornings unfolds in a less hectic and more novelistic manner than many police-procedurals, leaving space for meditations on natural history... investigatory digressions and dead ends, lucky chances, and the vicissitudes of the lonely narrator’s love-life.... Officer Farrell... proves to be excellent company.”
- Wall Street Journal