Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye

From the jacket:

Colin Nieman and Justin time abandon New York city for the tiny Kansas village of Galatea. Racially polarized and desperately poor, the town is dominated by Rosemary Krebs, a white matriarch determined to resurrect her lost Southern childhood, and Abraham Greeving, the black preacher who will do anything to stop her.

Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye is the story of violence and prejudice in small-town America: of Divine, a black hustler who’s slept with as many men as he can seduce; of Wade Painter, a white artist insulated by his wealth and hermitlike existence; of Webbie Greeving, a budding academic called back to take care of her disabled father; and of Myra Robinson, the grieving mother who lost her daughter long before she was kidnapped. As their stories unfold, we learn the truth about Galatea’s dark past and even darker future: of Eric Johnson, an albino black man lynched because of the color of his skin, and of Lucy Robinson, the white teenager who must pay for her parents’ crimes.

Ambitious, provocative, and compelling, Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye is a literary thriller writ large. An astonishing achievement that recalls the work of Carson McCullers and James Baldwin, it marks a bold new direction for a young novelist who “has defied the boundaries of autobiography and novel...Few writers have Dale Peck’s nerve.” (John Brenkman)