author
Coming in October 2018
During the mightiest dust storm of the 1930s an itinerant rainmaker is bludgeoned to death in a small Oklahoma town. Sheriff Temple Jennings, who is running for re-election in a tight race, struggles to solve the case. When he arrests a young man from the Civilian Conservation Corps, the sheriff’s wife, Etha, is convinced of the boy’s innocence and sets out to prove it.
BUY THE BOOK:
When a rainmaker is bludgeoned to death in the pitch blackness of a colossal dust storm, small-town sheriff, Temple Jennings, shoulders yet another burden in the hard times of the 1930s Dust Bowl. The killing only magnifies Jennings’s ongoing troubles–a formidable opponent in the upcoming election, the repugnant burden of enforcing farm foreclosures, and his wife’s lingering grief over the loss of their young son.
Advanced Praise
“Laurie Loewenstein’s vivid Death of a Rainmaker is at once an engrossing yarn, an elegant inquiry into human desperation and a portrait of Depression-era America so searingly authentic that the topsoil practically blows off each page.”
Chapter 1
There is no man more hopeful than a farmer, who wakes each morning to the vagaries of a heifer gone off her feed, seed that doesn’t take, a late spring, an early autumn, too much rain or, worst of all, no rain at all, and still climbs out of bed and pulls on his overalls. And so it would seem that a fellow who swears he can cure these agrarian heartaches, who swears he can make it rain, would be clinched to the bosom of every farm community from here to kingdom come.
