In a split-second decision that will shatter his life, insurance salesman Jack Spinks stops to help a young woman walking alone down a back country road. After getting into his truck the mysterious young woman grabs the steering wheel and forces the truck off the road, sending it plunging over a cliff and into the woods. What begins as a simple act of kindness spirals into a nightmare as Jack finds himself trapped in a dark and perilous world, hunted by the woman’s cryptic pursuers. As he fights for survival, Jack’s journey uncovers a haunting connection to his own past—one that may hold the key to unraveling the mystery and escaping the deadly forces closing in on him. From the highly acclaimed author of A Single Shot, A Reckoning Up Black Cat Hollow is a pulse-pounding crime thriller that weaves together psychological suspense and a gripping mystery, where every step brings Jack closer to a truth he’s long buried—and forces him to confront who, or what, he can truly trust.

Praise for A Reckoning Up Black Cat Hollow

“A blistering tale of the human condition filtered through a rural lens and sealed with the kind of gut punch that only Jones can deliver. A novel both thought provoking and smart, yet brutally tense and paced faster than a bullet. For everyone that didn’t already know, Matthew F. Jones is the true heir apparent to the kingdom of Cormac McCarthy. Yeah, he’s that fucking good.”

—Brian Panowich, author of Bull Mountain and Nothing But The Bones

“A Reckoning Up Black Cat Hollow is as fast-paced and unrelenting as any thriller you will find, but what makes Jones’s book so compelling is its psychological, at times metaphysical, journey into one man’s tormented soul. Reading the novel is like entering a clear mountain stream. You take a few steps and suddenly plunge into depths you’d not imagined. Matt Jones is an immensely talented writer, and this harrowing novel deserves a wide and appreciative audience.”

—Ron Rash, author of Serena and The World Made Straight

“A psychological thriller cut on the steepest grade with more switchbacks than a mountain haul road. A Reckoning Up Black Cat Hollow roars downhill with the brakes on fire. Jones sets a masterful pace.”

—David Joy, author of Those We Thought We Knew and When These Mountains Burn

“Haunted hills and dead ends and deep nights fill the pages of A Reckoning Up Black Cat Hollow, the latest from Matthew F. Jones, who is not afraid to go dark and dare you to look. Black Cat Hollow Road winds through a treacherous landscape, for a cast of characters who are caught somewhere between the real and the imagined, the truth and lies, and ultimately between what is right and wrong. A gripping, hardnosed tale told with balance, beauty, bleakness.”

—Michael Farris Smith, author of Salvage This World and Desperation Road

“Beginning with a chance encounter on a dark country road, and taking place over the course of a single brutal night, A Reckoning Up Black Cat Hollow is one of the most gripping, fast-paced crime novels you’re ever going to read. Jack Spinks is a fantastically complex character and A Reckoning Up Black Cat Hollow is a stunning read. I could easily see a sequel. Matthew Jones has proven once again that he’s one of the best and most original storytellers around.”

—Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Heavenly Table and The Devil All The Time

“Matthew F. Jones is a hard, wonderful and very powerful writer you might not know yet, but ought to soon. He will not spare your sensibilities should you be among those poor souls afflicted with such. He rakes you over the coals at a measured pace, unfurls rath from six angles and the amen he delivers will keep even twisted m...f’s… awake at night. Jones is major, he’s got the piss and vinegar and moral rigor that make books matter.”

—Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone

“A Reckoning Up Black Cat Hollow is a brilliant and searing novel that reminds us that Matthew Jones isn’t just one of our best writers of rural noir. He is one of our best writers. Period.”

—Mark Powell author of The Late Rebellion

“A Reckoning Up Black Cat Hollow is deeper, richer, better-written, and far more nuanced than the standard TV-inspired dross that passes for rural noir. Matthew F. Jones’ novel unfolds with the hallucinatory quality of meth and mescaline, immersing us in a world as searing as a fist in the face, as complex and beautiful and fast as life itself. Read it and hold tight. It’s like nothing you know.”

—Paul Cody, author of Walk the Dark, The Stolen Child, Love is Both Wave and Particle

“An epigraph from a Tom Waits song and an allusion to Paris, Texas on page one clued me in immediately that Matthew F. Jones’s A Reckoning Up Black Cat Hollow would be very far up my alley. The prose crackles, the pace is unrelenting, and Jones’s characters make an indelible impression. This is extraordinary work—thrilling, ambitious, and sharp-eyed. I can’t recommend it enough.”

—William Boyle, author of Saint of the Narrows Street

Praise for Matthew F. Jones’ previous novels

A Single Shot

“A harrowing literary thriller…a powerful blend of love and violence, of the grotesque and the tender.”

—Christopher Lehman-Haupt, The New York Times

“A backwoods drama that is part Crime And Punishment, part Deliverance and all white-knuckled suspense…A Single Shot packs a helluva punch.”

—Pam Lambert, People

“[A] high-voltage thriller, a gritty, claustrophobic blend of Jim Thompson and James Dickey.”

—Publishers Weekly *Starred Review

“A Single Shot {is} the finest portrait of guilt since Crime and Punishment.”

— Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A terrific novel…you can hardly breathe while you’re reading this book…[John Moon’s] crisis evokes every palm-sweating, heart-stopping, seemingly undoable mistake you’ve ever made.”

— Los Angeles Times

“Jones owns a fine writer’s eye for the kind of details that matter…it is Jones’ skillful straight-from-the–shoulder depiction of [Moon] and his pinched world that resonates and then compels…the author draws his disoriented thoughts with dark and excellent detail.”

— Daniel Woodrell, The Washington Post

Book Tracks

“Superlatives have been sapped of their meaning by overzealous critics, and somehow it sounds fake to say that a book is one of the ‘best things’ you’ve ‘read.’ It’s just that, sometimes (as in the case of Matthew F. Jones’s Boot Tracks) that happens to be true. I haven’t read something that made me empathize with a bad guy this intensely since I read In Cold Blood in high school.”

—Katy Haegele, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“More than just a very good crime thriller, this dark but illuminating novel shows us the psychopathology of the criminal mind. Brilliantly chilling in its step-by-step examination of the mechanics of committing a criminal act—the novel’s true terror is an interior one: an extreme close-up vision of the drive toward homicide. A nightmare thriller with the power to haunt.”

—Kirkus Reviews *Starred Review

“Boot Tracks is a strange but artful novel enlivened by some of the best low-life dialogue this side of Elmore Leonard….and Jones, who has written other well-regarded novels, is a writer worth meeting.”

—Patrick Andersen, The Washington Post

“Boot Tracks has the grace of a Japanese Noh poem and the violence of two lives burning out in front of our eyes.”

—Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune

“A swiftly paced thriller about a hit gone wrong, Matthew F. Jones’s Boot Tracks is also a brooding character study of a man who’s morally compromised though not entirely soulless.”

—Hannah Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

Blind Pursuit

"Jones is unpredictable and, therefore, terrifying. His characters are knowable, if changeable and complicated. If you say yes to his use of language (like deciding to read poetry) you will not be able to shake him. Jones is a surgeon throughout the novel, extracting the kernels of relationships, the black holes in the characters’ characters and giving even the smallest cameo roles unforgettable, essential quirks (reminiscent of Hitchcock).”

—Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Blind Pursuit is the kind of novel the phrase ‘a page-turner’ might have been invented for, an extremely well constructed (and sometimes quite moving) mystery.”

— David Pitt, Booklist

“Blind Pursuit stoops to little of the crude button-pushing typical of child-kidnapping thrillers. As in A Single Shot, Jones’s 1996 novel about a hunter who accidentally shoots a teenage runaway, the interior story is as gripping as the exterior plot, both unfolding with an awful inexorability.”

— Gary Krist, Salon

Deepwater

“Matthew F. Jones’s Deepwater is one of the best novels to cross my desk. Full of darkness and rage and nightmares its premise evokes James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. Brilliantly written, sweatily erotic, and unbearably suspenseful, Deepwater should go directly to the top of your reading list.”

— Les Roberts, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Deepwater is a harrowing and unsettling piece of fiction. It accomplishes the neat trick of fulfilling its literary aspirations without belying its affinity for genre fiction…it dissolves the boundaries between present and past, memory and prediction, doing and dreaming…inescapably chilling, it is the dark shadowy figure that lives on the other side of magical realism.”

—Austin Chronicle

“It’s a grim story, and one told exceedingly well…[Jones] creates tension with remarkable economy and intricacy in a sinister narrative that ultimately reveals itself as a powerful expression of loneliness, dangerous passions, and the quest for identity.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Jones and Daniel Woodrell are the leading contemporary authors of country noir, a subgenre whose roots trace back to James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. Jones builds tension from two seemingly contradictory sources: the noirist’s stock-in-trade, the disaster waiting to happen, and the crackling unpredictability that comes from the expert melding of genres: noir thriller crossed with psychological horror.”

—Bill Ott, Booklist *Starred Review

The Cooter Farm

“The Cooter Farm will remind readers of John Irving one minute, Joyce Carol Oates the next. An altogether remarkable debut.”

— Gene Lyons, Entertainment Weekly

“Dickens and Irving are high standards against which to measure any novel, let alone a debut. It’s a tribute to The Cooter Farm that those are exactly the comparisons it invokes.”

— Steven Kane, Los Angeles Daily News

“Jones’s blackly humorous first novel, set on the Cooter family’s failing dairy farm in New York State arouse(s) childhood angst and terror in (an) alternately amusing and tragic coming-of-age tale.”

—Publishers Weekly

The Elements of Hitting

“The Elements of Hitting approaches issues more important than keeping one’s eye on the ball and taking a level swing: the nature of forgiveness, the importance of self-respect, the many faces of love. At its core…[it] is an often haunting and occasionally beautiful story of man’s attempt to rebuild his life with two strikes against him.”

— Chris Bohjalian, Washington Post Book World