ABOUT THE BOOK The Runaway: A Novel FROM THE PUBLISHER The Runaway is the novel Terry Kay has wanted to write his entire career: the story of the earliest beginnings of desegregation in the South. Set in the 1940s and using as a springboard the relationship of two boys - one black and the other white - who have been mysteriously ordained at birth to spark the flames of change, The Runaway examines the joys, sorrows, conflicts, and racial disharmony of their historically biased environment. Tom and Son Jesus spend their days daydreaming, fishing, and trying to escape work. But their fun abruptly comes to a halt when they discover a bone during a fanciful runaway. The bone turns out to be part of the skeletal remains of Son Jesus' long-missing father, and leads to an investigation by Sheriff Frank Rucker, a World War II hero, that unmasks the racially motivated killer known only as Pegleg. The sheriff's findings divide the people of Overton County, forcing a surprising conclusion - or beginning - of justice. FROM THE CRITICS Publishers Weekly Even the most devoted among Kay's faithful fans, those who are awaiting a successor to To Dance with the White Dog, will have difficulty plodding through the forced prose in this overwritten tale of racial violence in rural north Georgia during the late 1940s. Readers who stick out the purple early chapters (dogs, the night breeze and gray light all manage to "slither") will be somewhat relieved to discover an engaging, if derivative, story lurking here. Kay enlists ghosts of Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird and God's Little Acrealong with a white-turbaned voodoo priestess called Conjure Womanin a brave, doomed attempt at country pathos. When two inseparable 12-year-old boysone white, one blackstumble onto a human leg bone sticking out of a sawdust pile, WWII hero Sheriff Frank Rucker is obliged to probe the unsolved murders of three black menmurders long attributed to a near-mythical masked phantom known in local lore only as Pegleg. Meanwhile, as racial hatred, economic and sexual exploitation and rising social consciousness erupt into rape and more murder, they threaten the sheriff's shy romance with the seductive widow of one of the suspects. Even once the plot gets underway, the writing is inflated and grandiose, and after a climactic, Grisham-esque courtroom scene helps fulfill the Conjure Woman's prophecy, Kay has left few clichs of the popular Southern novel unabused. Author tour. (Oct.) Library Journal The authenticity of Kay's characters is brought home skillfully by reader Dick Hill, who brilliantly renders the Southern voice in all its diversity: rich and poor, black and white, male and female, friendly and hateful. Kay's novel (LJ 8/97) describes a rural Georgia community in the years following World War II facing the beginnings of change in racial assumptions and attitudes. The discovery of a human bone by two 12-year-old boys (one black, one white) on a Huck Finn-inspired runaway initiates the investigation of three old murders of local black men by a racially motivated killer known ominously as Pegleg. Attitudes developed from war-time experiences mitigate somewhat against traditional racial sentiments, what a character in the novel calls "the law of the way things are." This work is scheduled to be a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation in 1998. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.Kristen L. Smith, Loras Coll. Lib., Dubuque, Iowa. AudioFile - Paula Horath-Neimayer Terry Kay's The Runaway begins at the end of WWII, when returning soldiers brought home a new respect for other peoples and races. When those soldiers returned to the South, tempers flared, and lives were irrevocably changed. Dick Hill imbues this novel with a fire equal to that burning in the hearts of the returning soldiers. His resonant voice carries the reader into the Deep South while his vocal characterizations lend a sense of realism to the novel. The listener is thoroughly drawn into the tale as Hill's masterful use of accent and timbre creates vivid, unique characters whose voices. 2 audio cassettes, BOXED, approximately 3 hours, abridged edition.

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