Hard-Twisted

Hard Twisted
C. Joseph Greaves
Bloombury, USA
November 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1608198559
$25.00
304 Pages


Dilllard Garrett is just trying to survive and raise his thirteen-year-old
daughter. After his wife dies, he finds himself homeless in the year 1934 during the Great Depression hand-to-mouth in Oklahoma. Lucille, his daughter, nick
named Lottie, is always agreeable and helpful. That is just her personality.

Life consists of day-to-day survival until they meet Clint Palmer, a convicted felon recently released from Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Clint never completely tells anyone the truth about himself. The fictional person is easier to believe than the true to life psychotic one.

With the threesome combining into an easy friendship, smooth-talking Clint
masterfully twists all facts into his convenient realities as they travel throughout Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Texas. What the Garretts are unaware about is the psychotic twisted mind of Clint. With the Garrett's dream of living a normal life, Clint quickly maneuvers his stories as the group drifts from town-to-town hearing of the recent deaths of the notorious Bonnie and Clyde.

When Lottie's father disappears, she accept Clint's explanation. She continues to accept additional ones as time progresses and the stories become more complicated. For survival, Lottie is forced to have her hair cut so that she looks like a boy and even to being Clint's common-law wife. She quickly learns not to question him but just to be supportive.

While the author, C. Joseph Greaves and his wife were hiking in a remote Utah canyon many years ago, they discovered two human skulls. This led to the research on this real event and this novel about the “skeleton murders” of 1935 in Texas. This story became Hard-Twisted and won the Best Historical Novel of 2010 by the Southwest Writers recognizing C. Joseph Greaves with the coveted
Storyteller Award.

Hard-Twisted might have happened years ago but the story is relevant today in dealing with anyone who seems to have an answer to everything, logical or not, and what happened to those who chose to challenge the psychotic mind.