Cottonwood

Praise

Praise for Cottonwood
 
“[Phillips] writes about criminal behaviors . . . with wit and gusto . . . That Ogden stays unpredictable to the end is a tribute to [Phillips’s] refusal to rewrite history and whitewash the hellions who built this nation.”
—The New York Times Book Review
 
“An indelible portrait of a haunted town, as starkly delineated and unsparing as an antique tintype.”
—Entertainment Weekly
 
“An adventurous, bawdy, and genre-bending epic. Scott Phillips cements his reputation as a fearless, ambitious writer who never makes a false move.”
—George Pelecanos
 
“Scott Phillips is dark, dangerous, and important. Cottonwood is crime fiction at its best.”
—Michael Connelly
 
“Unique and pungent prose . . . It’s not Phillips’s thoughtful, exciting plotting but rather his amazing ear for the sad sounds behind the words of his people that make his novels so exceptional.”
—Chicago Tribune
 
“Gunfights and murders, lynchings and thefts . . . It is Western-noir with a touch of the gothic.”
—Rocky Mountain News
 
“Phillips takes the reader on a witty ride into a sometimes humorous, sometimes grotesque version of life on the Kansas prairie.”
—Winston-Salem Journal
 
“In a book that is as much history as mystery, Scott Phillips makes the dirt streets and rough life of the Kansas prairie come alive.”
—Kansas City Star
 
“[Phillips] not only has hit the literary equivalent of three homers in a row with his first three novels, but each one has been a grand slam.”
—Chicago Sun-Times

“The crime writer to watch. His first novel, The Ice Harvest, was a pitch-perfect slice of noir; he followed this with a quirky but equally impressive prequel, The Walkaway. Now he’s produced Cottonwood, a genre-bending Western cum serial killer and mystery story that is unflinchingly violent and laugh-out-loud funny. I absolutely loved this book.”
—The Guardian

“If the novel starts like Blazing Saddles with additional dialogue by Charles Dickens (in unusually jaundiced and violent mood) there is the promise that it will turn into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre . . . funny, strange, hypnotic.”
—The Daily Telegraph

“The blazingly original Phillips writes with deadpan humor and incisive irony . . . A major achievement.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review