The last orchard in America

the long version

Sue Longtree is too young to be a matriarch, but when she moves to run down the story behind her brother's suicide, she stands at the top looking down on a family in shambles. The suicide's hardly a whodunit, as the private dick that Longtree hires, our hero Harry Jome, sees it. Or is it? The answer may lie less in a wall's bloodstains or the cheap framed prints that cover them than in the pages of a manuscript. This hardboiled literary meta-noir channels both the genre's suspense and seaminess, and at once offers an implicit critique of the culture that makes it possible.