Tidewater Blood

Rocky Mountain News

Tidewater Blood offers as tight a plot as anything John Grisham has ever dreamed up but with the eyes and ears of a much better writer.

Arizona Daily Star

Extraordinary.

St. Petersburg Times

Wonderful.

Houston Tribune

Intense and riveting.

Southern Living

Fast-paced.

Roanoke Times

Vibrant...Engaging.

Boston Book Review

Exhilarating.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

As a maiden voyage into the choppy waters of suspense, this virtually seamless 11th novel from the acclaimed Hoffman Follow Me Home is a rousing success. The abused, outcast youngest son of an arrogant Tidewater, Va., patriarch becomes the unwitting fall guy for the macabre bombing assassination of his oldest brother's entire family on the occasion of the clan's 250th anniversary celebration. Falsely accused, broke and friendless, black sheep Charles LeBlanc flees injustice for Montana but soon discovers there's no place to hide until he clears his name. Following a tenuous trail back to his roots half-literally, in the family's once prosperous but long abandoned coal mines in the wilds of southeastern West Virginia, he stays a half-jump ahead of his pursuers as he is befriended by an ancient mountain woman and a brassy, one-eyed publican with a heartbreaking past of her own. As the net closes around him, LeBlanc uncovers the moldy notebook of one of his father's employees, and the serpentine trail leads back to the bomb-charred ruins of the baronial Virginia mansion. Murky family secrets, long-festering bitterness and diabolical vengeance swirl to the surface in a satisfying denouement. No doubt about it, Hoffman's honed literary skills serve him well even when he lets plot do the driving. Apr.

Library Journal

After doing time in Vietnam and then in Leavenworth, Charley LeBlanc has renounced his Virginian aristocratic heritage in favor of leading a penniless hermit's life. His simple existence is disturbed when an explosion at his family's ancestral home takes the lives of his brother and his brother's family, and Charley is tracked down and booked on suspicion of murder. A deal with the sheriff somewhat improbably sets him free from jail, and the novel becomes one of detection, as Charley delves into his family's past, staying just a step ahead of the law and finding aid and comfort from a number of colorful Southern backwoods types in the role of deus ex machina. Indeed, Hoffman (Follow Me Home, LJ 8/94) draws heavily for substance and style from two James Dickey novels, Deliverance and To the White Sea. This is a gripping read, and we pull for Charley without quite having a reason to like him. David Dodd, Santa Cruz City-Cty. Lib. Sys.,Capitola, CA

School Library Journal

YA-At Bellerive, home of the Virginia LeBlancs ("in America, the bluest of bloods"), the current residents are set to begin the annual celebration in honor of the family's 1740 Huguenot founder. A sudden explosion rips apart the plantation's portico killing John LeBlanc, III, his wife, son, and a longtime family employee. The local authorities immediately focus on one suspect-Charley, youngest son and indisputable black sheep. Having served time in both Vietnam and Leavenworth and estranged from his family, Charley now lives alone in a tar-paper shack on a tiny inlet off the Chesapeake Bay. Or he did, until the sheriff hauls him off to the county jail where he's labeled a child killer and reminded repeatedly of Virginia's use of the electric chair. A young attorney provides grudging legal assistance, and, once free on bail, Charley pursues his only true recourse-finding out what happened at Bellerive that August afternoon and why. His route takes him back to the family's source of wealth, the coal mines of West Virginia, where he learns all that he seeks-and more. Hoffman's greatest talent may be his ability to create striking characters. He is particularly adept at depicting the independent eccentrics who inhabit the West Virginia mountains, from self-sufficient Aunt Jessie to Blackie, the physically and emotionally wounded proprietor of a mountain beer joint, to a mysterious cave-dwelling thief. Steer YAs looking for a well-written whodunit toward this one.-Dori DeSpain, Herndon Fortnightly Library, Fairfax County, VA

Kirkus Reviews

Murder, injustice, flight, detectionþa disappointingly, though expertly, formulaic tale from Hoffman (Follow Me Home, 1994, etc.). Only two misfortunes mar the festivities when the LeBlanc family, the doyens of Tidewater, gather at Bellerive, the family manse, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Jean Maupin LeBlanc's arrival in Virginia. One is the absence of black-sheep brother Charley LeBlanc, still persona non grata at Bellerive even though he's been released early from Leavenworth on account of good behavior. The other is an explosion that kills John LeBlanc, the head of the family, and his wife and son. (Middle brother Edward's family, a few minutes late in arriving, live to celebrate other anniversaries.) The police naturally assume that Charley, whose feud with his family goes back to a time before his father's death, is responsibleþit's exactly the sort of poke in the family eye that would have struck him as appropriateþand so they send a deputation to his subsistence camp in Lizard Inlet to haul him in. The King County sheriff and the Commonwealth's Attorney assume he's guilty; ditto his court-appointed lawyer. But they can't find any physical evidence that would tie Charley, long banished from Bellerive, to the scene, and while they're looking they agree to widen Charley's confinement to the county limits. It's Charley's cue to tug at his leash and hell around, of course, and in a series of memorable vignettes he sweet-talks rides from strangers, swaps lies with country fisherman, brawls with jealous barflies, and casually begins to pick up information about the fatal blastþinformation that implicates him in quite a different role than killer, andpoints to a dead man as the real bomber. Limpid and swift-moving, with a full complement of understated surprises: an exemplary presentation of the innocent man on the run for readers who want more texture than they can find in The Fugitive.