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Mica Highways [Hardcover]

William Elliott Hazelgrove (Author)
3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)


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Book Description

November 3, 1998
A hypnotic tale of terror and temptation, William Elliott Hazelgrove's Mica Highways is an emotion-packed novel that deftly captures the unique landscape of the American South.  With its fierce vision of love, violence, and redemption, this powerfully haunting work recalls the intensity and passion of To Kill a Mockingbird and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

April 4, 1968.  To the world, it was the day an assassin's bullet struck down Dr.  Martin Luther King Jr.  To Charlie Tidewater, it was the day that life as he knew it was over--the day his beautiful mother suddenly died.

Tamara Drake Tidewater was a descendant of one of Virginia's first families, and Charlie was only nine years old when she passed away.  The newspaper obituary said she died peacefully, but Charlie knows that the obituary was a lie.

Thirty years later, Charlie remains haunted by the mystery surrounding his mother's untimely death.  Newly divorced, he has returned to his childhood home near Richmond, down the glittering mica highways of rural Virginia.  He hopes that discovering how his mother really died will finally enable him to lay the ghosts of his troubled past to rest.  But the one man who can help Charlie has no intention of unveiling horrors he has spent three decades trying to hide.

To unearth the truth about Tamara's death, Charlie must delve into the darkest corners of the Old South, into its twisted secrets and decadent desires.  Shifting seamlessly between Charlie's present-day search for answers and the South's racially charged past, Mica Highways reveals the hidden sins of one small town with a dark history of burning crosses and cold-blooded murder.

A searing fusion of fact and suspense fiction, Mica Highways is as compelling as it is disturbing--a spellbinding and incisive tale from one of today's most gifted storytellers.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It's hard to say what the ghost of Ernest Hemingway would think of some of the riper writing in William Elliott Hazelgrove's new psychological thriller; lines such as "Darkness cast shadows on the tangled sheet by his knees, turning his shirt on the chair to dirty linen" might give Hem's shade pause. But Hemingway would probably approve of most of the work being done in his old attic in Oak Park, Illinois, which Hazelgrove has turned into a studio to produce his praised novels Ripples and Tobacco Sticks.

Mica Highways is more conventional in its plotting and ambition than its predecessors, but equally strong on Southern atmosphere and fully imagined characters. Thirty years after his mother's mysterious death in 1968 (on the same day that Martin Luther King was killed), Charlie Tidewater makes a trip back to his boyhood home near Richmond, Virginia, leaving behind in Chicago a failed marriage and an equally unsuccessful career as a stockbroker. He stays with his only surviving relative--Granddaddy, Austin Turin, almost 90, a man who knows everything about cars and quite a lot about how people behave under pressure. Charlie is a dry stick, a standard seeker of truth, but Granddaddy has enough meat and juice and memories in him to keep the story moving to its surprisingly suspenseful conclusion. --Dick Adler

From Publishers Weekly

Admirers of Hazelgrove's highly regarded earlier fiction (Ripples; Tobacco Sticks) may be dismayed by his overripe prose in this dark tale of Southern racial hatred and murder spanning three generations of an aristocratic Virginia family. Haunted by the troubling enigma of his mother's death on the day of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Virginia-born Chicago stockbroker Charlie Tidewater leaves his job and marriage and the "mica highways" of the North to visit his granddaddy in Richmond. As the conundrum begins to unravel, Charlie is stalked by shadowy figures who try to intimidate him into going back North. He meets and becomes enamored of a young divorced mother whose father, a respected judge, seems to have some sinister connection with Charlie's past. Told in the third person, the narrative cuts between the present and events concerning Charlie's family as far back as 1927. Unfortunately, Hazelgrove indulges in overwrought and pretentious prose: "Charlie turned to the windows in their lightless dimension, seeing something he couldn't place, but felt in the void he was seeing." Despite the mildly intriguing plot, even the most forgiving readers may be put off by the author's self-conscious straining to find literary Nirvana.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Bantam (November 3, 1998)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0553106392
  • ISBN-13: 978-0553106398
  • Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,329,576 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in Richmond, Virginia, and carted back and forth between Virginia and Baltimore, I blame my rootless, restless personality on my father. He was and is a traveling salesman with a keen gift of gab, great wit, a ready joke, and could sell white tennis shoes to coal miners.

It was during these sojourns up and down the east coast I soaked up the stories that would later be Tobacco Sticks and Mica Highways. I think authors should exploit their family history before raping the rest of the culture for material.

Dad finally got tired of the east and moved to the Midwest when I was fourteen. We settled outside of Chicago. It is here I came of age and went off to college for seven years -- two degrees and one novel later I returned to Chicago and lived in many different apartments, trying to get a little two hundred page manuscript called Ripples published.

When a local printer said he would take a chance on my book, I jumped and had my first novel published by a man who had never published anything. Great reviews and moderate sales put me back to my jobs as a janitor, baker, waiter, construction worker, teacher, real estate tycoon, mortgage broker, professor, security guard, salesman -- anything to make a buck and keep writing. The printer lost his mind and published my second novel, too. That landed me with Bantam after some rave reviews and a paperback auction for my second novel, Tobacco Sticks.

A third novel, Mica Highways, was sold on less than one hundred and fifty pages to Bantam and then I did a strange thing -- I settled down to writing in Ernest Hemingway's birthplace in Oak Park, Illinois. I have since been looking for the Great American Novel up in the old red oak rafters and I think I might have finally found one.... My new novel, Rocket Man, is an exploration of what the American Dream means today. A man moves to the suburbs and his life falls apart in one week. It is a satire but with events now, it seems very timely.

 

Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
5 star:
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4 star:
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3 star:    (0)
2 star:
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Average Customer Review
3.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book, well thought out and well realized., January 11, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Mica Highways (Hardcover)
This novel was a complete surprise for me. I picked it up on Sunday morning was compelled to finish it before I went to work on Monday morning. The southern ethos is beautifull developed, the characters realistic, and the plot twists are unexpected. It is, unfortunately, probably too politically incorrect for the movies, but I cast it as Jimmy Smits as Charlie Tidewater, returning to Richmond 30 years after the death of his mother, Jason Robards as Austin Turin, the mysterious grandfather, Robert Duvall as Judge Barrek, the almost archetypal aristocrat and Mary-Louise Parker as the love interest. This is a thrilling, poetic, suspenseful novel.
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4.0 out of 5 stars This is a thoughtful and suspenseful mystery., January 19, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Mica Highways (Hardcover)
I truly enjoyed reading this book. In fact, I think this is the best book of the three books that Mr. Hazelgrove has written. It draws the reader into a family web of secrets and connects current events in the book with events from the past. The ending of this book is a true surprise but not an unreasonable result. For mystery lovers it is truly addictive. I couldn't put it down!
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2.0 out of 5 stars Surpising ending to this book which is his first mystery., December 18, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Mica Highways (Hardcover)
It handles topics of racisism from the typical white southerners 1940's view. I find it offensive from todays standards. It is set in the 1910's through the 1960's. The author doesn't seem to know much about cars, and to car buffs this will show itself. It also seems as if someone hacked the hell (editor perhaps?) out of this story, which has some confusing jumps in storyline. It is still very nicely and dreamliy written overall, and a good book to read. The author is still not a tight storyteller like Hunter Thompson.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
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First Sentence:
Sunshine dappled into Granddaddy's bedroom. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
old bootleggers, lug wrench
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Rufus John, Uncle Edwin, Miz Drake, Charlie Tidewater, Virginia August, Sherwood Anders, Austin Turin, Goochland County, James River, Miz Turin, Marilee Road Southampton, Martin Luther King, Monument Avenue, New York, Mistah Turin, Willy John
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