Library Journal
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Darl Moody was trespassing on his neighbor's land as he tracked a huge buck through the woods in the mountains of western North Carolina. If he killed it, the buck would provide food to last through the winter. To his horror, Darl misses the animal and accidently shoots and kills the youngest of the Brewer brothers, who had been digging for ginseng. The Brewers are a family notorious for vengeance and violence. In his panic, Darl calls best friend Calvin Hooper to help him hide the body. When Dwayne Brewer can't find his missing sibling, he seeks vengeance on Darl, Calvin, and Calvin's longtime sweetheart, Angie, who were the last people to see Dwayne's brother alive. The events that subsequently unfold will forever change their lives. VERDICT Joy, whose debut novel, Where All the Light Tends To Go, was an Edgar Award finalist, delivers a stunning third Southern noir novel (after Weight of This World). Fans of Ron Rash will love the atmospheric Appalachian setting wrapped up in a suspenseful plot. [See Prepub Alert, 2/12/18.]-Russell Michalak, Goldey-Beacom Coll. Lib., Wilmington, DE © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

*Starred Review* Two men are poaching on private land in western North Carolina when a horrible accident occurs. Sissy Brewer is gathering ginseng when Darl Moody, hunting for meat to feed his family, mistakes Sissy for an animal and shoots. The aftermath changes lives, as Moody fearful of violence toward his family from the Brewers recruits his best friend, Calvin Hooper, to help him bury the body rather than alerting authorities. While Moody and Hooper live with guilt, Brewer's older brother, Dwayne, a large, Bible-quoting man quick to rage, who has his own sense of justice, ferrets out the truth and begins to exact revenge. In their final confrontation, Dwayne tells Hooper, The only reason we're here is because of the ones we loved. That's the line that held us. Joy has proved adept with southern noir in his first two novels, Where All Light Tends to Go (2015) and The Weight of This World (2017), and he nails it again here, in the actions of characters who act as they must, for the sake of family and friendship, given their nature. This is fiction as beautiful and compelling as it is searing.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist

Publishers Weekly
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Joy (Where All Light Tends to Go) pulls no punches in this stark and violent examination of sacrifice and suffering. After Darl Moody accidentally shoots and kills Carol "Sissy" Brewer while hunting, he enlists his best friend, Calvin Hooper, to help hide the body, as he fears the retaliation of Sissy's savage, hulking brother, Dwayne. Rightfully so, it turns out, as Dwayne sets out for savage revenge after he can't find his brother and comes across blood traces in an area where he normally digs for ginseng. Instead of focusing on salt-of-the-earth Darl, Calvin, and Calvin's girlfriend, Angie, who form a pact to cover up the crime, the narrative centers on Dwayne; his fixation on maniacal justice as he hunts down and exacts revenge is terrifying yet complicated through haunting glimpses of his abusive childhood and dedication to his family. The eerie presence of Sissy's dead body throughout the novel, meanwhile, compounds the paranoia that builds alongside Dwayne's and Calvin's troubled ruminations, culminating by the end in the powerful possibility of collective redemption. Fans of Frank Bill and Cormac McCarthy will enjoy this gritty thriller. Agent: Julia Kenny, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Library Journal
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Having stunned us with The Weight of This World and Where All Light Tends To Go, an Edgar finalist for Best First Novel, Joy returns with another dark and gritty literary read. Darl Moody is out chasing the big buck he's been pursuing forever when he inadvertently shoots and kills a man digging ginseng. He's a Brewer, a family known to be particularly vindictive, and Darl desperately asks best friend Calvin Hooper to help him cover up the death. But as Dwayne Brewer looks for his missing brother, he has little trouble following the bloody trail they've left behind. Illuminating Appalachia.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A fatal hunting accident and its coverup prompt this tale of violence and revenge in the mountains of western North Carolina. When Darl Moody, who's poaching out-of-season deer, accidentally kills Carol "Sissy" Brewer, who's poaching someone else's ginseng, he knows he's got a problem: namely Sissy's brother, Dwayne Brewer, who steals chainsaws for a living, pulls guns on bullies in Walmart bathrooms, and spends his spare time "fieldstripping and reassembling his Colt 1911 as fast as he [can] with his eyes closed." Darl knows Dwayne isn't the kind of guy who'd say, "Hey man, I know you killed my brother and all, but...no hard feelings," so he decides to bury Sissy, and he gets his friend Calvin Hooper to help. Unfortunately, they leave a breadcrumb trail, and Dwayne, whose love for Sissy was "the deepesthe'd ever known," follows it, bent on revenge. Joy's (The Weight of This World, 2017, etc.) third novel is a fast-paced, tightly plotted thriller that falls short of its literary pretensionsin fact, it's more pretension than anything else. Dwayne, misunderstood "trash" who loves his brother and can quote the Bible, has been explicitly compared to the Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," Anton Chigurh of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, Judge Holden of McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and Lester Ballard of McCarthy's Child of God. But where these prophetic villains are classically inscrutable, Dwaynelike the rest of Joy's novelis the opposite. There is no human mystery. Every action, thought, and motivation is explained. To be fair, there are some competent fight scenes. And Sissy's decomposing body is nicely visceral. And in between the melodrama and clich, Joy does manage a few inspired local details: "as each addition rotted away, a new one was hammered togetherso that slowly, through decades, the five-room shanty shifted around the property." But for the most part this book is a sculpture of lazy sentences ("The place where he could take no more had come and gone in the blink of an eye and now here he sat little more than a husk of what he was a week before") and prepackaged profundity ("mothers should not bury their children").Pretentious, overtold, and transparentJoy mistakes literary allusion for literary merit. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.