Among those storyline angles guaranteed to grab my attention in a thriller is anything connected to the US Civil War, a conflict I find endlessly fascinating and would love to have more time to study.
So Edward Wright's new book, Damnation Falls, was always going to find its way to the top of my reading list at some point, given a reference to the Civil War in its blurb.
As it happens, the Civil War plays only a small, but significant, role in this story of old, dangerous secrets harboured in the Tennessee town of Pilgrim's Rest.
But no matter. The plot is constructed over a series of shifting tectonic plates that includes politics, big business, family loyalty, journalism, small town sensitivities and, of course, murder.
Randall Wilkes is a disgraced, big city journalist lured back to his home state to write the memoirs of a friend, Sonny McMahan, a former Tennessee governor who wants to use his biography, and an economic regeneration project around Pilgrim's Rest, to relaunch his stalled political career.
But when the former governor's mother is found hanged over Damnation Falls a local beauty spot, just hours after ranting to Wilkes about dangerous secrets that threaten her son, the journalists begins to ask questions that nobody seems to want answered. And when shortly afterwards he discovers that a long buried body found near the site is that of a former old flame - thirty years previously - rather than a Civil War soldier, as previously presumed, Wilkes begins to investigate the circumstances surrounding her violent death.
As Wilkes begins to delve further into the life of the town, a series of facts come to light that throw suspicion onto a number of locals, including his old friend Sonny. And as Wilkes' suspicions grow, so does the body count.
Damnation Falls is a superior thriller with a plausible, compelling plot that burns slowly at first before exploding into life and holding the reader in a vice-like grip. Wright constructs his prose with a deceptive, relaxed simplicity that is underpinned by acute observations of the complexities of the human condition. Ambition, loyalty, guilt, love, lust and more are all stripped bare and put under the microscope.
The result is a splendid, atmospheric, thoughtful novel that will keep readers guessing right up until a savage conclusion.