PROMISED LAND

In this intense sequel to Holy City (2024), struggling deputy sheriff Will Seems investigates a strange disappearance in Virginia’s Snakefoot swamp that cuts across racial, blood, and historical lines.

Bearing physical as well as psychological wounds from the tortuous events in Holy City, Seems and his police partner (and former romantic interest) Tania Jameson are out to find Lucas “Rainbo” Boon after his pickup truck is found abandoned in a muddy ditch with bloodstains and bullets inside. Into the murk, mire, and hidden mysteries of the swampland go the cops in search of Rainbo, reluctantly accompanied by his teenage grandson Buck Tomlin. A man with an assumed name who hid his violent past, Rainbo rose above it in marrying Barbara Tully Boon, a descendent of slaves who went on to inherit the plantation where her ancestors once toiled—a stroke of good fortune that Rainbo’s brother-in-law Roddy Lacey, a Vietnam vet numb to bloodshed, couldn’t believe even after Rainbo gifted his family a chunk of the acreage. When Rainbo’s stiff, barely breathing body is found dumped outside a hospital, the mysteries of who’s responsible and why multiply in the face of other local killings, including those of Donnie Thinh, leader of the Cambodian gang the True Brothers, and Buck’s friend Isaiah, who led him into the gang. Few novels have reflected their setting as powerfully as this one, with its ever denser, ever darker narrative and its evocative language, ranging from “a baby who looked as if he’d swallowed a star” to “the rough tremble of his grief.” With his two novels, Wise has leaped to the forefront of recharging and reshaping Southern fiction.

A bravura and sometimes brutal novel about our efforts to cope with darkness and denial.