The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne

By: Ron Currie

Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan

“Literary thrillers just don’t come any better than Ron Currie’s The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne. It’s profoundly serious and terrifying in equal measure.” –Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Somebody's Fool

A mythic, propulsive novel about the tangled fates of a matriarchal crime family in Maine.

Your ancestors breathe through you. Sometimes, they call for vengeance.

Babs Dionne, proud Franco-American, doting grandmother, and vicious crime matriarch, rules her small town of Waterville, Maine, with an iron fist. She controls the flow of drugs into Little Canada with the help of her loyal lieutenants, girlfriends since they were teenagers, and her eldest daughter, Lori, a Marine vet struggling with addiction.

When a drug kingpin discovers that his numbers are down in the upper northeast, he sends a malevolent force, known only as The Man, to investigate. At the same time, Babs's youngest daughter, Sis, has gone missing, which doesn't seem at all like a coincidence. In twenty-four hours, Sis will be found dead, and the whole town will seek shelter from Babs’s wrath.

The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne is a crime saga like no other, with a ferocious matriarch at its bruised, beating heart. With sharp wit and profound empathy, award-winning author Ron Currie, delivers an unforgettable novel exploring love, retribution, and the ancestral roots that both nurture and trap us.

Excellent book in presentation and performance

I very much enjoyed Currie's novel. The characters were sparely drawn but with the perfect amount to bring them to life and convey their roles. The performance by Flanagan was very well done. She is a new narrator to me and I have looked for other work by her now that I have listened to this book.

It was difficult to listen to because of all of the hurt, addiction, poverty and racism,but it was compelling

That it was dealing with difficult topics that are all to present in rural areas as businesses move out

Compelling Realty

One of the best novels ever read! The characters and story lines so real. Performance put you in the action. This author is a master smith of descriptive phrases!!

Pretty exceptional, especially for this transplant

I came to Maine in 1974, having grown up in New Jersey till 1970 and then living briefly in Colorado and Vermont. I was familiar with racism, but I'd no sense that the Franco-American population occupied the niche that the African-American occupied in New Jersey. Ron Currie has written a book from the inside of the Franco-American experience, with almost entirely female characters, that made me long to have had a family that cared so much about each other and felt so connected to their larger community. I especially liked the vicious portrayals of the white protestant gentry and realized that I had met those caricatures in the flesh. I'm pretty impatient with a lot of contemporary novels, but not this one.

So good

Wowza, love this story. The characters were great, love all women and how they were truly the responsible ones. and reading was spectacular