Nic Pizzolatto was born in New Orleans and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana. So reader, you will have to buy it, read it and decide for yourself. While she liked it, she was not as enthusiastic in its praise as I was. I read it, wanted to start over and read it again. I have come to realise that reading is an individual experience, a personal pleasure and everyone takes something different from each book. Dennis Lehane contributes to the cover blurb with the following: “An often incandescent fever of dreams of low-rent, unbearable beauty … it’s an elegy to the broken and the never-weres, to those who got themselves lost so that someone – anyone, might come looking.” I could not disagree with that. I was sucked into the world of Ray Cady, with writing that is extraordinary in its simplicity. Though Galveston is not a traditional crime/detective book, it is suffused with violent criminal acts.

It was sun-baked the colour of golden oak and draped across jagged bones.” “It was the sort of place for people with nowhere else to go, a motel where the occasional guest checked in to commit suicide, people too absorbed in their own failures to pay much attention to us.” And again…”A woman emerged out the room behind the counter, her flesh so grooved and dehydrated it might have been cured in a smokehouse. Pizzolatto paints ordinary scenes with a colourful palate. The book was described by Entertainment Weekly, as “A taut little noir novel.” And at just under 260 pages, it is “little” but is packed with such vivid writing that I wanted more. And like True Detective, it switches smoothly from past to present. Pizzolatto combines violence with pathos, sometimes in the same sentence and his writing is sharp and extremely visual. They go on the run from his boss, travelling from New Orleans to Galveston, Texas, along a highway of seedy bars and fleabag hotels with death just a car-length behind.

Cady becomes entwined with a frightened, defiant young woman. Galveston takes you on a journey with Ray Cady, a “bad man” by his own admission, a man who has nothing to lose, having received a probable death sentence (lung cancer).

Pizzalotto’s Galveston mirrors this and it is also much more. The TV series portrays its main protagonists through tight characterisation and visually it contains vast panoramic views of desolate, barely habitable landscapes. Therefore, I opened this book expecting a dark thriller, rich with Southern atmosphere. I must declare that I am a tiny bit biased in favour of Pizzolatto, because I loved True Detective. He wrote and produced the series and strange as it may seem, Galveston is his debut novel. If you are familiar with the crime TV series, “True Detective”, you may recognise the name Nic Pizzolatto.

National Emerging Writer Programme Overview.

Nic pizzolatto novel