Bring Me the Head
of Yorkie Goodman
by Rowdy Yates
$4.99 ebook; $14.95 trade paperback
“Who’s Yorkie Goodman?” asks Wallace, an enforcer for an East Coast drug cartel. “Just a fella” says his boss, who goes by the name Boss. Just a fella … but Boss wants Yorkie Goodman taken out. He wants it so badly, he’ll risk sending Wallace into Wallace’s own past where a beautiful woman he abandoned years before still holds a bewitching power over him like some ancient siren song. He wants it so badly, he's sending along his deadliest assassin, Carp, to make sure the job is done right. And he wants proof … proof in the form of Goodman’s head delivered in a portable cooler. So begins Wallace’s twisted, violent odyssey into the American heartland - an odyssey that inevitably forces him to choose between love and gangland loyalty. Written in spare, gritty prose, Bring Me the Head of Yorkie Goodman takes you on a page-turning, Tarantinoesque ride to the end of the road.
Praise for Bring Me the Head of Yorkie Goodman
Five star review of Bring Me the Head
from ForeWord Reviews. Click Here.
Bring Me the Head of Yorkie Goodman by Rowdy Yates
In this violent, darkly funny novel from the pseudonymous Yates (Jared Yates Sexton, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Bull), Bill Wallace, an enforcer for a small-time East Coast drug lord known simply as Boss, has to collect an unpaid debt from Yorkie Goodman, a seemingly innocuous 62-year-old schlub. Goodman happens to live in Seymour, Ind., where 14 years earlier Wallace got into trouble and had to split town fast, leaving a broken-hearted woman behind. Boss pairs Wallace with Carp, a hit man who appears to be dying, and orders them to bring back macabre proof of a successful mission: Goodman's head. Naturally, things go south quickly, as Wallace has plans of his own. Carp, meanwhile, proves himself to be indestructible. The duo quickly end up on the radar of the local police chief, whose laconic old-school commentary addressed to his deputy provides comic relief. Yates (An End to All Things) gives obvious nods to the works of Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers (Fargo, in particular) in an over-the-top tale whose infectious energy will prove irresistible to devotees of modern noir. (June)
Reviewed by Publishers Weekly.
“Bill Wallace, the protagonist of Bring Me the Head of Yorkie Goodman, learns you an go home again but that it’s probably not a good idea if you’re also accompanied by a psychotic enforcer named Carp with more than one hidden agenda. Giving Peckinpah a smile, Tarantino a wink, and McCarthy a nod, Yates puts Wallace in the fast lane to hell and Seymour Indiana. Crime fiction aficionados will not want to miss catching a ride.”
—Lynn Kostoff, author of Words to Die For and A Choice of Nightmares
“Rowdy Yates writes with a style that plunges the reader into the world of the story, in this case a startlingly fun and fresh take on the well-worn crime novel. Bring Me the Head of Yorkie Goodman is sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes unclassifiable, always beautiful, never dull - like Warren Oates and Elmore Leonard walked onto the set of Fargo. And yet, underneath the suspense and the gunfire and the dreary dusk of the heartland, there's real heart here, real love for the places we call home and the people we'd do anything to protect.”
—Matthew Fogarty, Editor of Cartagena Journal and Co-Editor of Yemassee Journal
“Fast, bloody, and taut as razor-wire, Bring Me the Head of Yorkie Goodman roils with action and dark humor, plus the occasional moment of jaw-dropping poignancy. If you’re a fan of Elmore Leonard, Cormac McCarthy, Samuel Beckett, or the Coen brothers, you need to add Jared Yates Sexton to your reading list.”
—Michael Meyerhofer, author of Wytchfire
“Bring Me the Head of Yorkie Goodman, with its liquor-slick voice and finely tuned prose, is 100% Hoosier grit. This is the debut of a serious—and seriously good—author of crime fiction. Bear witness.”
—Andrew Scott, author of Naked Summer
“At the pounding heart of Yates’s superb first novel are good men doing bad despite their conscience and bad men doing worse in the absence of their conscience, and every shade of moral corruption in between. More than anything, Yates knows these guys and these places the rest of us tend to avoid and brings the grittiest of language to bare their ink-black souls on the page. He gets inside these characters’ heads and under their skin to bleed out the darkest heart of the human condition. By the end of Bring Me the Head of Yorkie Goodman, Yates has managed to do what the best novels of any genre should: implicate the conscience of nearly everyone involved, not the least of whom, you, my dear reader.”
—Benjamin Drevlow, author of Bend with the Knees and Other Love Advice from My Father
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