Remarkable. Intoxicating. Arresting. Poetic.

A tale of macho violence and alternative horticulture in a creepy edge-of-the-world setting... puts readers in mind of Denis Johnson’s Already Dead... and Russell Banks’s unbeautiful losers. Rickstad takes his time setting his story in motion, but once he does it’s a powerfully bloody mess. The body count is high, and the violence persuasive. Most remarkable is the evocation of the territory, the gothic tangle of native forest and exotic cash crop that mirrors the characters’ claustrophobic inner landscapes [and] the grimly poetic images scattered throughout, like flashes of submerged lives never quite reeled in.

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Speak! is a bullet to the brain, a hardboiled romp of the American Dream knocked cockeyed with humor. A foul-mouthed, lean, mean, mad novel of mayhem. Rickstad’s hard-edged prose, crack dialogue, and a taut plot serve up a savagely sardonic and riotously subversive novel about the lunacy of greed and the power of language that ratchets up the tension until the very twisted end. As the Hollywood Hills burn...Jimbo needs a gun. Mr. Tolbert needs $30k. Ray and Bird need tips on torture. Old Leroy and Ms. Sheila need a fast escape. Agent One and Agent Two need a bigger budget. And all of them need Mahmoud to speak English before more blood is shed. Don't bet on that happening anytime soon...

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Killing in the Kingdom is the most provocative, entertaining and suspenseful literary thriller I've read since Elmore Leonard's Bandits 20 years ago.
— Howard Frank Mosher

A girl’s murder during Vermont’s gay marriage battle unleashes a town’s darkest prejudices and most violent impulses that leads to the arrest of a boy who swears he’s innocent... So what if he is? In Rickstad’s dark Gothic thrillers, no one is safe. Not the characters. Not the reader. Rickstad's unconcerned about tying the mystery in a tidy bow so you can sleep well. He'd rather you not sleep at all. A Killing in the Kingdom doesn’t just keep you up reading, it keeps you up long after you’re done reading.

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