Magnolias in Paradise - Paperback

by Leonard Seet (Author)

Ernst arrives at the Paradise train station with fifty-thousand dollars to ransom his sweetheart, and while looking among the crowd for the young man with a magnolia, a beggar seizes his bag of cash and escapes through the revolving door. Chasing after the rascal, he slams into his contact--his girlfriend's lover in town. Now, he must beat his love-rival to the money and rescue her before the deadline. Magnolias in Paradise, which writer David Lentz compared to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, is a 96,000-word crime novel and the first in a potential series. As in Larry Brown's Father and Son, good confronts evil in a southern town. And as in Joe R. Lansdale's Cold in July, an ordinary man gets sucked into a conspiracy, with psychopaths terrorizing a small town and FBI agents going after a corrupt sheriff. In the end, the man must take the law into his hands. But in this case, ending in tragedy. Here, I combined Will Christopher Baer's surreal settings and mentally unstable villains, with Brian Evenson's literary minimalism and heroes cursing their knowledge.

Author Biography

Leonard Seet's short fictions have appeared in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Banana Writers, and Pilcrow & Dagger. He learned the art of writing from Brando Skyhorse and Tim Johnston through George Washington University's Jennie McKean Moore Fiction Workshop, which was by application.