Beginning with his stunning first novel, A Short History of a Small Place, and in all the books that have followed, T. R. Pearson has created an ever-enlarging fictional realm where laugh-out-loud humor is interwoven with some of mankind's darkest impulses. The result is that seamless tapestry found in all true literature, the human comedy. With his unmistakable colloquial idiom, his hilariously eccentric characters, and the enduring resonance of his tales of fortune and.

folly, Pearson has given us a world that forever will be fixed in the geography of our imagination. In Cry Me a River, his sixth novel, Pearson writes of murder and its consequences in a small Southern town. When an officer of the law is brutally slain, a fellow cop - one with a particular sensitivity to the darker corners of the human heart - sets out to solve the crime, not at first suspecting that, in his words, "we were after all, under the surface of things, a.

community of passionate people who sometimes slaughtered each other for love." By the book's end we know who done it and why, but the greatest pleasure lies in Pearson's own investigations into carnal relations, sexual jealousy, men and women, the mean, the low-down, and the dead. That he performs them with such winsome humor and unflagging originality is a tribute to his craft. Cry Me a River is Pearson at his finest. It is also his most accessible novel to date.