An Affair of Honor
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
In this powerful novel—the capstone to Richard Marius’s illustrious career—a gripping double murder propels the small, Bible-obsessed town of Bourbonville, Tennessee, into connection with the wider society opening up in the years following World War II.
At the center: Charles Alexander, twenty, groomed from birth by his mother to be a Baptist minister,
teetering on the edge of his faith. In his last year of college, working late one night at the newspaper office, he accidentally witnesses the murders. The killer is Hope Kirby, World War II hero, member of a large mountain clan of farmers, who has discovered his wife’s infidelity. Although Kirby’s code of honor requires that he exact vengeance, it won’t allow him to kill an innocent bystander, and Charles goes free, promising not to tell what he’s seen.
But Charles does tell, and we watch, fascinated, as a trial, an appeal, and a new terror unleashed on the countryside draw the entire county into the action. Among the people most closely involved: the skillful, overweight, hard-drinking lawyer for the defense; two Baptist preachers—one liberal, one a strict constructionist—each with a secret to hide; a lady banker determinedly headed for trouble; a big-hearted good-
old-boy sheriff; Charles’s disturbingly freewheeling, freethinking sometime college girlfriend. Most importantly, we see the Kirby clan: Pappy, whose extraordinary patience, hard work, and self-reliance cause his hardscrabble farm to prosper until he’s turned out by the coming of a national park; and the five Kirby sons, who are trying hard to make a new place for themselves in the town.
As these and others play their parts in the affair of honor, we see Charles and the Kirbys begin to reexamine their dramatically opposing but equally encapsulated ways of viewing life—fundamentalist Christian and ancient “code of the hills.” And as the novel draws to its climactic and satisfying close, we see them—and finally the entire town—profoundly, permanently changed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the early 1950s, Bourbonville, Tenn., becomes a crucible for moral self-examination and religious debate, as a double murder forces the community to confront dizzying changes in the fabric of life since WWII. When Hope Kirby murders his wife and her lover, he is following the code of the hills and the orders of his father. Unfortunately, 20-year-old Charles Alexander, an aspiring Baptist preacher of already wavering faith, happens upon the crime scene. Hope's code doesn't condone killing an innocent boy, so he lets Charles live after exacting from him a promise of silence. But Charles is not able to keep his secret, and soon the town is consumed by the drama of a murder trial. Hope is a war hero, and there is strong sympathy for him even though his guilt is evident. But he begins to see that his code has served him poorly, that he has been changed by the violence in his life and that indeed the world has changed since his family was forced off their land in the mountains. Charles too must face the weakness of his faith and the many quiet hypocrisies of his life. Others touched by the tragedy face similar crises of faith: rival preachers at neighboring Baptist churches clash in their advice to Charles even as they repress damning secrets of their own pasts. The sheriff and prison guards question the honor of their duties, and the Kirby brothers eventually oppose their father. Marius (The Coming of Rain; After the War), who died in 1999, confidently draws on history, psychology, theology, autobiographical detail and an obvious belief in his characters to bring them vividly to life in this lovingly captured time and place, where establishing the true history of events and personalities becomes as gripping as unmasking a murderer.
