A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion: A Novel
"Once again, Ron Hansen has proved that he has no peer in the writing of fiction about biographical characters. No one writing today is better at re-creating the past than Hansen, and no one gives better insight into his characters. In this instance, Ron Hansen re-creates the Roaring Twenties with a sense of immediacy and authenticity that I haven't seen since the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O'Hara. James M. Cain once said that the greatest of human tragedies usually takes place when people get what they want. That's the story we find in A WILD SURGE OF GUILTY PASSION. Could this happen to us, we ask ourselves. The question is a haunting one. Ron Hansen takes us into the heart of America, and the journey never allows us to stop turning the page." —James Lee Burke“A Wild Surge of Guilty Passionis by turns blackly comic, irresistibly seductive, and implacably devastating. As a tour of the Seven Deadly Sins, it’s pretty much unsurpassed in recent literature.”—Jim Shepard, whose most recent story collection isYou Think That's Bad