Rating: 
Summary: An Honset Look at Racisim
Review: This is a great, entertaining and thought provoking read. Wiltse's characters are always very introspective. I found this to be an honest representation of a man keenly aware of and working through his feelings about race. This is an old mystery solved in the present with a realistic perspective. Wiltse writes this type of character so very well and, as always, weaves a solid mystery plot.
Rating: 
Summary: A Masterful Story
Review: This is a story of a small-town investigation into a lynching that took place 50 years ago. Our hero, and the hero of his hometown of Falls City, Nebraska is sheriff's deputy Billy Tree and he is urged to investigate by an unknown person who uses a very unconventional method in which to grab his attention. The lynching from so long ago is destined to affect Billy and others close to him in more ways than he can imagine.Although Billy is a good man who is admired by his fellow townsfolk, he constantly battles his own feelings of jealousy and prejudice and never believes that he his worthy of their admiration. This book deals quite sensitively with race issues and prejudices and the way, not only Billy tries to fight them, but the way the greater population still accepts them. Wiltse manages to describe rural Nebraska so poetically that he makes what would normally be considered a boring landscape of flat fields of corn seem beautiful and special to behold. His description of a Nebraska sunset had me ready to pack up my belongings and head straight to the cornfields myself.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating
Review: What a fascinating book and what a fascinating author. I have read all of Wiltse's books and each seems better than the other, but he's on a new level here with characterization, content, psychological insight. If there's a better writer in this genre, I've never read him.
The range of matters he hits on here is wide, but the nature of jealousy, sex, racial relations and personal ego are among them. I can't rate The Hangman's Knot highly enough, they don't offer enough stars at this site.
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