Books on Our Radar: The Ballad of Dinah Caldwell by Kate Brauning

True Grit meets Sadie in this #ownvoices near-future revenge thriller that tackles capitalism, queerness, and revolution.

Look, with an intro like that, how can you possibly not smash the preorder button immediately? The Ballad of Dinah Caldwell isn’t out until November 2nd but promises to be a must-read this year!

The Ballad of Dinah Caldwell

by Kate Brauning
Published by: Page Street Publishing
on November 2, 2021
Genres: Contemporary, Speculative Fiction, Thriller
Pages: 368
Audible
Goodreads

True Grit meets Sadie in this #ownvoices near-future revenge thriller that tackles capitalism, queerness, and revolution.

Seventeen-year-old Dinah runs her family’s farm in the Ozarks. When she finds her grief-stricken mother dead in the living room with wealthy rancher Gabriel Gates standing over her, Dinah’s life narrows to a single point: kill Gabriel Gates.
But Gates has built his wealth giving out bad loans and surrounds himself with bodyguards. Dinah’s mountains are now one giant foreclosure, including her own farm. It all belongs to him. Once he puts a ten-thousand-dollar reward on Dinah’s head, everyone in the starving county wants a piece of her.

Homeless and alone in the woods, all she has is Johnny, the moonshining bootlegger at home in the caves. He begs her to leave the mountains, to start over with a new life. But Dinah is hell-bent on sparking a county revolution. She’ll lose her life to see this killer dead.