Dust in the Heart
About this ebook
Wilton Drake's hip was shattered by a sniper's bullet in Lebanon...and his heart was ripped apart by the wife who left him as lay in a military hospital. Now, after fiteen years in the Navy, he's returned to Edgefield, North Carolina a broken man, looking for a way to hold himself together. He finds it in a bottle...and behind a badge as Webster County's newly elected Sheriff...but his forbidden attraction to a mysterious stripper and his harrowing investigation into a horrific string of child murders might destroy what's left of him, body and soul.
"Ralph Dennis has mastered the genre and supplied top entertainment." New York Times
"His prose is muscular, swift and highly readable. " Joe R. Lansdale, author of the Hap & Leonard novels, the basis for the hit TV series.
"Exceptional characterization, strong and vigorous prose, and a glimpse into a place and time that has long since disappeared." Mystery Scene Magazine
"An underappreciated master." Robert J. Randisi, founder of the Private Eye Writers of America.
"Straight-up, hardboiled crime fiction, written in a tight, evocative voice with a wicked, dark sense of humor." Lee Goldberg, #1 New York Times bestselling author ofTrue Fiction and Lost Hills.
About the author
Ralph Dennis isn’t a household name… but he should be. He is widely considered among crime writers as a master of the genre, denied the recognition he deserved because his twelve Hardman books, which are beloved and highly sought-after collectables now, were poorly packaged in the 1970s by Popular Library as a cheap men’s action-adventure paperbacks with numbered titles.
Even so, some top critics saw past the cheesy covers and noticed that he was producing work as good as John D. MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross MacDonald.
The New York Times praised the Hardman novels for “expert writing, plotting, and an unusual degree of sensitivity. Dennis has mastered the genre and supplied top entertainment.” The Philadelphia Daily News proclaimed Hardman“the best series around, but they’ve got such terrible covers…”
Unfortunately, Popular Library didn’t take the hint and continued to present the series like hack work, dooming the novels to a short shelf-life and obscurity…except among generations of crime writers, like novelist Joe R. Lansdale (the Hap & Leonard series) and screenwriter Shane Black (the Lethal Weapon movies), who’ve kept Dennis’ legacy alive through word-of-mouth and by acknowledging his influence on their stellar work.
Ralph Dennis wrote three other novels that were published outside of the Hardman series but he wasn’t able to reach the wide audience, or gain the critical acclaim, that he deserved during his lifetime.
He was born in 1931 in Sumter, South Carolina, and received a masters degree from University of North Carolina, where he later taught film and television writing after serving a stint in the Navy. At the time of his death in 1988, he was working at a bookstore in Atlanta and had a file cabinet full of unpublished novels.