Don't Know Tough

October 1, 2021

After pulling up his California roots to become head coach of a high school football team in Arkansas, Trent Powers invites star running back Billy Lowe to live with him and his family. Billy is wound knot-tight and is sometimes explosively angry with teammates owing to dread of his unsteady mother's violent boyfriend. Then the man is murdered, and the town shatters into violence of its own. Winner of the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2022
A high school football player and his coach struggle to survive the violence-strewn path to the Arkansas state championship. Nobody, including himself, thinks that Billy Lowe is the star his brother Ricky was. Before he flamed out in a haze of alcohol and failing grades, Ricky was quarterback for the Denton Pirates; Billy's just a running back. But the abuse he suffers at the hands of Travis Rodney, his mother's lover of five years, and his obsessive comparisons of himself to his brother fuel both an unflinching determination to win and a rage that erupts without warning on and off the field. After Billy hits Austin Murphy so hard during practice that the well-connected sophomore is out five minutes with a concussion, Don Bradshaw, the school principal, draws up a list of conditions Billy will have to meet before he can take the field again. As if on cue, Trent Powers, the coach who considers Arkansas a purgatory to which the yearslong failure of the Fernando Valley Jaguars sent him from California, rips up most of the conditions because he can't afford to lose the championship. Neither can his grimly supportive wife, Marley, the most sharply drawn character in a first novel bristling with dangerous energy. When Trent and assistant coach Bull Kennedy find Travis beaten to death, everyone assumes that Billy has finally turned on his tormentor. But Trent, who took Billy into his home when his mother, Tina, vamoosed with his baby brother, doubles down on his ability to offer the boy salvation, and Lorna, Trent's teenage daughter, makes Billy her personal project. You can just imagine how well everyone's plans for escape turn out. Friday Night Darks.

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January 10, 2022
Trent Powers, the hero of Cranor’s arresting debut, and his family move from California to Denton, Ark., where Trent has been hired to coach the Pirates, the town’s high school football team. The Pirates make it to the playoffs, though things sour when star player Billy Lowe, who shares a trailer with his single mother, hits rich kid Austin Murphy too hard in practice, putting the coach in a bind on whether to play or bench Billy and placing him at odds with his wife, who’s desperate to get back to California. Meanwhile, homelife in the Lowes’ trailer falls apart when Billy knocks out Travis Rodney, his mother’s abusive boyfriend. The discovery of Travis’s rotting body a week later raises the stakes. Cranor builds tension by shifting between third person and Billy’s first-person account as the idealistic Trent contends with some powerful locals whose values are at odds with his own. Evocative prose is a plus (“Arkansas hills produce crazy like the Earth’s mantle produces diamonds: enough heat and pressure to make all things hard”). Readers will be curious to see what Cranor does next. Agent: Alexa Stark, Trident Media.

March 1, 2022

DEBUT Billy Lowe is the best running back the Denton High School Pirates have seen in years, and he could be their ticket to the coveted Arkansas state football championship. Years of abuse at the hands of Travis Rodney, his mother's boyfriend, have hardened Billy, and his reaction to anything that frustrates him is violence. The Pirates' coach, Trent Powers, has his own troubled past. Trent's own football coach provided him with a path out of abusive foster homes when he was a teenager; now Trent wants to lift Billy from the cycle of poverty and abuse that has plagued the Lowe family. When Travis is found dead, there are many suspects; clues point to Billy, whose volatile temper and violent outbursts are well known, but the truth is darker and more complex. VERDICT Cranor's debut is a searing exploration of the toxic heart of Southern high school football culture, including the human price of winning at all costs; think Friday Night Lights with extra darkness. Readers of Daniel Woodrell and Allen Eskens will appreciate the visceral detail in this Ozarks noir.--Nanette Donohue

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2022
The comparison to Friday Night Lights will jump out at readers of this hard-as-nails debut thriller, but, in fact, beyond the thematic link to high-school football, the two stories live in very different worlds. In the celebrated TV show, there is a sense of possibility; in Cranor's novel, as in the best genuine noirs, there is only inevitability: ""What has been started cannot stop. Not until it's over."" Billy Lowe, a rampaging running back for the Denton, Arkansas, Pirates, lives in a trailer with his alcoholic mother and her out-of-control, abusive boyfriend, Travis, who drinks NyQuil to ""save his whiskey up."" Billy finds an outlet for his ever-simmering rage on the football field, but his bursts of violence go beyond even girdiron tolerance levels, like the time he puts a teammate in a wheelchair during the dreaded Blood Alley drill. Naturally, when Travis turns up dead in the family trailer, the eyes of Denton fall on Billy. Enter Billy's coach, Trent Powers, whose peculiar idealism, stirred into a volatile brew with a shot of born-again religion and his own dark past, leads him on a crusade to save his star. We know the trajectory the story will follow (down, always down), but that doesn't lessen the crackle of Cranor's electric prose, nor does it make his characters any less unequivocally real, their fates any less heartbreaking.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The buzz is growing for this superb debut, winner of the Peter Lovesey Best First Crime Novel contest.

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