Audiobook9 hours
Fateful Mornings: A Henry Farrell Novel
Written by Tom Bouman
Narrated by Joe Barrett
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
()
About this audiobook
A woman's chilling disappearance haunts a rural Pennsylvania county in the eagerly awaited new Henry Farrell mystery from the Edgar Award-winning author of Dry Bones in the Valley.
Tom Bouman's Dry Bones in the Valley won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The New York Times hailed it as "beautifully written," and the Washington Post called it a "mesmerizing and often terrifying story."
In Wild Thyme, Pennsylvania, summer has brought Officer Henry Farrell nothing but trouble. Heroin has arrived with a surge in burglaries and other crime. When local carpenter Kevin O'Keeffe admits that he shot a man and that his girlfriend, Penny, is missing, the search leads the small-town cop to an industrial vice district across state lines that has already ensnared more than one of his neighbors. With the patience of a hunter, Farrell ventures into a world of shadow beyond the fields and forests of home.
Tom Bouman's Dry Bones in the Valley won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The New York Times hailed it as "beautifully written," and the Washington Post called it a "mesmerizing and often terrifying story."
In Wild Thyme, Pennsylvania, summer has brought Officer Henry Farrell nothing but trouble. Heroin has arrived with a surge in burglaries and other crime. When local carpenter Kevin O'Keeffe admits that he shot a man and that his girlfriend, Penny, is missing, the search leads the small-town cop to an industrial vice district across state lines that has already ensnared more than one of his neighbors. With the patience of a hunter, Farrell ventures into a world of shadow beyond the fields and forests of home.
Related to Fateful Mornings
Titles in the series (2)
Fateful Mornings: A Henry Farrell Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Bramble and the Rose: A Henry Farrell Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related audiobooks
Cold Water Burning Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hard Country Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dead Man's Wake: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Curious Eat Themselves Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hope to Die Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Caretaker: A Mike Bowditch Short Mystery Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Nothing Short of Dying: A Clyde Barr Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bad Axe County: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Music of What Happens Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crossroad Blues: 25th Anniversary Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMidnight Guardians: A Max Freeman Mystery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sorrow Hand: A Nick Drake Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Big Gamble Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wolf Kill Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lady Jail Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Under Tower Peak Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bad Moon Rising: A Bad Axe County Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Angels Will Not Care Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Deed to Death Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Death and the Language of Happiness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Promise to Kill: A Clyde Barr Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hermit's Peak Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hawke's Prey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hell Is Open Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cold Snap Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5When They Come for You Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dead Man Dancing: A Bad Axe County Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Angel Flights Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Going Dark Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Mystery For You
Listen for the Lie: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fifth Suspect Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hit and Run Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5None of This is True: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Girl, Alone (An Ella Dark FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 1): 01 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Sherlock Holmes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Murder on the Orient Express: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5If She Knew (A Kate Wise Mystery—Book 1) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Word is Murder: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heaven’s Crooked Finger Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5What Lies in the Woods: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5And Then There Were None Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Good Girl's Guide to Murder: A Debutante Dropout Mystery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Did I Kill You?: A Thriller Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Finlay Donovan Is Killing It: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5One for the Money Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crooked House Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When No One Is Watching: A Thriller Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Death on the Nile: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The River We Remember: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tell No One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Botanist's Guide to Parties and Poisons Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Unexpected Guest Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hallowe'en Party: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mother-Daughter Murder Night: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Perfume: The Story of a Murderer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silence of the Lambs: 25th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Fateful Mornings
Rating: 3.37499995625 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
16 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Bouman's first novel, Dry Bones of the Valley, was a stunner, with prose you wrote down or got out of your chair to read to your spouse. This one... not quite so much. But still an order of magnitude better than the industrially-churned out crap that keeps popping up on my benighted public library's webpage. Henry Farrell is still morose, brooding, and alone (except for a really unfortunate inclination to jump at the booty-call texts he gets from a local married woman. Of course it ends badly...). He hunts, he drinks, he drives around in his truck, he plays a soulful bluegrass fiddle. And he wanders around, into, and through the violence, abuse, cruelty and misery of the residents of Wild Thyme township, centering around the disappearance of the female half of a pathetic couple ensnared in poverty, drugs and alcohol. Bouman's best gift is his portrait of these folks: rural, poor, enmeshed in each other's networks of cousins, siblings, in-laws, bosses... everyone is connected somehow. It sounds depressing, and it is - sometimes - but he also sees their humanity, that no one wants to rat out their brother-in-law even if he is dealing; the anguished woman who cries for her missing sister no matter how badly she's hurt her. It's a community of people we don't see, and should. There is also the beauty of the woods, the rivers, the lakes; the music, the work ethic, the legitimate beefs and conflicts.
All that said, this is a tougher read than Dry Bones. The pacing lags, drags, slows, wanders... partly to illustrate how these backwoods crimes and problems drag out because there are too few cops and lawyers, boundaries are blurred, and sometimes just because no one cares enough to pursue. But after a while, after months and seasons pass, all those cousins and strangers and drifters start to get confusing, and it's difficult for the reader to maintain a keen interest either. Farrell meets a woman. That relationship chugs into low gear, but I still gagged on the first spark of passion between them being lit by a dawn deer hunt. The musical scenes, admirably written as they are, don't seem to serve much purpose other than Bouman (also a musician) wanted to write them. A side plot about a building project may interest carpenters, and the language of wood working is often rather poetic and rich, but is peripheral.
Good writing, a vivid and important cultural portrait. A bit slow and rambly, but he does know how to write a corpse. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I almost didn't label it Police Procedural, because Henry sure doesn't feel compelled to follow the rules to the letter. He's a local boy, back after military, experience life & love, and then heartbreak/death.
Music is much of his life.
He's a good ol' boy, and yet not...
2nd of this line, still enjoyable. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5FATEFUL MORNINGS(HENRY FARRELL #2) BY TOM BOUMAN is the second in the Henry Farrell mysteries set in Wild Thyme Pennsylvania a small town but a town that is now seeing the dangers of drugs. Farrell is not only fighting the crime related to drugs, but now he has a missing person,possible murder on his hands. This is the first in the Henry Farrell books I've read and I liked it so much I'm going to looking for the first book so I can really enjoy the series, in other words I'm hooked! Boumans main character, Henry Farrell is not your perfect law enforcement officer . He fools around with married women, & he drinks, sometimes too much, which makes Farrell seem just like regular folks. Maybe that's why he's such a good law officer & a good main character for this series.I recieved this book free from goodreads in exchange for an honest review.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Henry Farrell is the lone policeman who patrols the back roads of Wild Thyme township in rural northeastern Pennsylvania. Mostly his job isn’t too demanding. He can park his vehicle and spend time enjoying the local lakes and forests without anyone much missing him. He can even take on an illegal after-hours job. He helps dismantle old barns and salvage the wood for new barns designed by his best friend, wordworking genius Ed Brennan.In Bouman’s fine descriptions of Henry’s world, you can just about smell the trees and ponds along with Henry, who narrates most chapters. In Henry and several other principal characters in this rural noir novel, Bouman has created well-rounded, complex individuals. Henry also plays fiddle in a roots music trio, for example.These bucolic images coexist uneasily alongside the dirty business of hydraulic fracking and the even dirtier practice of drug dealing, which are ravaging the natural and human resources of Wild Thyme. As a result, law enforcement in the township is about to face some serious challenges. At first, it’s an uptick in burglaries and motor vehicle accidents, which Henry attributes to the rise in drug abuse. But then a young woman goes missing. Penny Pellings is a sometimes heroin user who lives in a trailer with her boyfriend. The pair has lost custody of their infant daughter. Though they want her back, they aren’t on a road that can lead to that outcome. The search for Penny Pellings requires the casting of a rather wide net, which takes Henry out of his jurisdiction. He has a thoughtful, amiable demeanor that helps him interact well with nearby departments that have many more resources than he does in Wild Thyme. So many crime novels focus on the turf battles and stonewalling between police agencies, it’s refreshing to see real cooperation. Investigating Penny’s fate is an almost geological endeavor. Each layer excavated reveals another, with its own mysteries. In the end, the resolution of her story seems almost secondary to the 360-degree picture of the community of Wild Thyme that the author has created.Bouman won an Edgar Award in 2015 for his first novel, Dry Bones in the Valley, also featuring Henry Farrell.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Received an ARC of the book from the publisher. If you like your crime novels to be of the meandering it's a boys life variety, this is the book for you. It certainly felt as if more time was spent on telling the protagonists life history, personality quirts, hobbies, and foibles than was spent trying to solve the various crimes that were committed. For what it was, it was well written; however, what it was wasn't really my cup of tea.