COMING JUNE 1, 2018....

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...The trouble with K.C. Brown's dream of playing alto sax with a local jazz band is that she's a nineteen-year-old white girl, the band members are middle-aged black men, the year is 1948, and they all live in a racially divided town in Iowa.

Here, there be magic

Even though it's historical fiction, with all the gritty, brutal real-life truth we expect from the genre, "In the Blood" is a 20th Century fairy tale.

And even though K.C. Brown is the youngest sibling of two sisters and a brother who died bravely in WWII, she finds her fairy godmother, so to speak, in the most unexpected form, a lonely jazz trombonist with mangled hands.

Twisted people, twisted history. Dave Hoing has a rare gift of making me wince and cringe and shield my eyes, but it's too late, I've been pulled into the story, and this fictional world is so real, I can no more leave the story than I could end my own life.

Hoing and Hileman always deliver

lyrical prose, quotable quotes, and provocative insights.

Character development is spot-on, even in the most minor players.

I guarantee it.

Poignant, tragic, maddening,

horrifying events, usually taken straight from real life, make all their stories unforgettable.
Just try to forget what happened to Freddy's fingers. And why he was unable to get proper medical care.
Or the workers who went on strike at the meat packing plant, and the shooting that happened in real life, though names were changed in the novel.

World War II is still a recent memory

when the novel opens in the same town we read about in "Hammon Falls," with its haunting tale of a WWI soldier taken--you guessed it--straight from real life. Hoing and Hileman fictionalize the names of the towns, but local business and landmarks are recognizable to anyone who's been there. Lost loved ones live on in fiction.

KC's brother Kenny is forever a part of her,

gone but not forgotten

in that way so many of us know all too well. Whatever she does, wherever she goes, she carries part of her brother with her. Hard-hitting prose, lean, economical, lyrical, captures this in scene after scene. E.g.

Her brother didn’t miss the war. Kenny didn’t wait to be drafted, enlisting in ’41. He was brave. He was the best. He volunteered for every dangerous mission. He died. He never got to have a wife, or a house, or children, or a dog. Worse, all of his music died with him­--all, except what was left inside K.C.

KC may seem like an anachronism, the only free-thinking member of her family, resisting the limited expectations of a girl in a small Iowa town. Women, along with Blacks, were held back in a court of public opinion that punished those who stepped outside boundaries that society held dear. It was an era where racism was acceptable and allowing blacks to rent hotel rooms was not. Naturally, the white folk took pride in being tolerant of blacks living and working alongside them, but Hoing yanks the curtain back on their ignorance with snarky inner monologues that ring true, e.g.:

The white folks here didn’t like blacks any more than in Biloxi or Selma, but most were too stupid even to be good racists.

and

... one of those progressive white families that was on the side of the Negro. Made no difference what they said they believed: push come to shove, none of them wanted one of their own living black. Being fair-minded was fine, long as it involved someone else’s kid.

KC reminds me of my sister, who in 1975 insisted on thinking for herself (gasp! Everyone else in town hadn't left the 1950s yet), and who would have done all the things KC does (on a guitar, not sax, and vocals, and fine, as a rock star, not a jazz musician, but let's just sayKC really captured so many things I've seen in real life. And as a result of her strong-minded, independent thinking, KC thinks of herself as a nice person but she doesn't have many (any) friends.

"Could I buy a signed copy of Hammond Falls? Do you have a sequel to that?"

Dave Hoing replies to a friend via Facebook (March 2018),

...I don't have any spare copies of Hammon Falls, but Roger does.
Our next book, In the Blood, is sort of a sequel, in that it takes place in the same town, and one of the main characters is the son of one of the secondary characters in Hammon Falls. Also, Will Hammon, from Hammon Falls, makes a brief appearance in In the Blood. So the two books are closely related, but their plots are completely different.

Paperback and ebooks are still available here: HAMMON FALLS

When George Hammon's teenaged wife dies in childbirth in 1914, he flees small-town Iowa for Europe and the horrors of the Great War. Surviving battles, homelessness, and disease, he squanders his days on women and wine, trying to forget his lost love. But life is not idle in Iowa during his absence, and when a bitter and weary George comes home twenty-two years later, he finds a web of murder, suicide, and shocking revelations. The future of his family rests on one terrible choice...but is he prepared to make it? Spanning the years 1893 through 2009, "Hammon Falls" weaves a tapestry of estrangement, loss, love, sacrifice, and redemption.

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I met Dave in a fiction workshop taught by Nancy Price, author of "Sleeping with the Enemy" (which became a movie starring Julia Roberts). We read the manuscript on half a ream of 8x10 photocopied sheets of paper, in spring 1985.

I'm waiting to hear from Dave if his publisher will email ARCs (Advanced Review Copies) to potential book reviewers and bloggers.

Roger Hileman (left) and Dave Hoing at Hearst Center for the Arts | photo by Lu Ann Hileman | January 30, 2017

You can read more about Dave at my blog:
Dave Hoingan.wordpress.com/2014/12/19/dave-hoing/ Posted on December 19, 2014 by carolkean

Dave Hoing isn’t just an author.

He’s more than a writer whose tightly crafted prose has me sighing with admiration. Dave is the only author I read who’s known me in person since 1985–-before braces, before Carol got married and had three children. Who else goes back that far, as a fellow author and beta reader? Nobody! Even as friends go, I can’t think of anyone else I’m still in contact with now who’s known me that many years.

Other blog posts about Dave here:

“A Killing Snow” by Dave Hoing and Roger Hileman

Posted on September 7, 2016
A woman journalist and her husband, a meteorologist, settle in a small 19th C Nebraska town, where prejudice against Irish immigrants is even worse than anti-Indian sentiment–the Natives, at least, stay segregated on a nearby reservation. Child abuse is commonplace, bullies … Continue reading →

Plainview by Dave Hoing: award-winning story based on 3 Iowa Cold Cases

Posted on March 21, 2015
Iowa author Dave Hoing‘s two-part short story, “Plainview,” a literary piece loosely based on the real-life unsolved murders of three girls in and near Waverly in the 1970s, has been reprinted in The Interrogator and Other Criminally Good Fiction along with heavyweights of the genre such … Continue reading →

A Murdered Sibling, A Fellow Author, and Good Riddance to the Killer

Posted on June 29, 2015
*Dave Hoing is a gifted author and a treasured friend. We first met in a fiction workshop in 1985... Dave has published countless science … * Continue reading →

Until next time,

Keangaroo

because Kean sounds like Kane (not keen, hint, hint)

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