For his acclaimed debut, Finn, Jon Clinch borrowed from Mark Twain, telling the story of Huckleberry Finn's malicious father. In his masterful and compassionate new novel, Kings of the Earth, Clinch borrows again, this time from a true-life case of possible fratricide in 1990. Through evocative descriptions of the rural landscape—"a countryside full of that same old homegrown desolation"—and by imbuing these odd men with a gentle nobility and an "antique strangeness," Clinch has created a haunting, suspenseful story