Rough Animals

A Novel

By: Rae DelBianco

Narrated by: Victor Bevine

The 25 Best Thriller Books of the Summer- New York Post
Best New Books Coming Out Summer 2018 - Southern Living
46 Great Books to Read This Summer - Nylon
Dazzling Debuts - WYPR, "The Weekly Reader"
Summer Thrillers That Will Have You at the Edge of Your Chaise Lounge - Refinery29
8 New Books You Should Read This June - vulture.com
What We Read, Watched, and Listened to in May - Outside

“Furious and electric...a fever dream."(Publishers Weekly)

Breaking Bad meets No Country for Old Men...

Ever since their father's untimely death five years before, Wyatt Smith and his inseparably close twin sister, Lucy, have scraped by alone on their family's isolated ranch in Box Elder County, Utah. That is until one morning when, just after spotting one of their steers lying dead in the field, Wyatt is hit in the arm by a hail of gunfire that takes four more cattle with it. The shooter: a fever-eyed, fearsome girl-child with a TEC-9 in her left hand and a worn shotgun in her right.

They hold the girl captive, but she breaks loose overnight and heads south into the desert. With the dawning realization that the loss of cattle will mean the certain loss of the ranch, Wyatt feels he has no choice but to go after her and somehow find restitution for what's been lost. Wyatt's decision sets him on an epic 12-day odyssey through a nightmarish underworld he only half understands - a world that pitches him not only against the primordial ways of men and the beautiful yet brutally unforgiving landscape but also against himself.

As he winds his way down from the mountains of Box Elder to the mesas of Monument Valley and back, Wyatt is forced to look for the first time at who he is and what he’s capable of and how those hard truths set him irrevocably apart from the one person he’s ever really known and loved. Steeped in a mythic, wildly alive language of its own, and gripping from the first gunshot to the last, Rough Animals is a tour de force from a powerful new voice.

©2018 Abigail Rae DelBianco (P)2019 Audible, Inc.

Loved this!

Great story, narration and characters! I hope to see more Rae in the future. Started off a little slow for me but then, man it takes off. It’s definitely worth a second listen as well. Much more came out of it for me in round 2, which was just as enjoyable as the first!

Lyrical, poetic and mysterious.

First off, this is not your typical thriller, mystery or western. It’s very lyrical, nearly every paragraph has at least one beautifully poetic turn of phrase. The characters are never fully explained, you really don’t know who or what they are exactly. It’s set in a familiar setting but that’s just not quite right. Maybe an alternate earth that is very similar to ours but just a bit different. It’s unusual, it’s weird, I hated it at first because it wasn’t what I expected. But the longer I listened, the more I got into its slightly offbeat phrasing, intriguing characters and cadence. I couldn’t get enough. This is one of those driveway listening books. The narrator did a fantastic job.