It’s always weird to talk about advance praise of your own stuff because you don’t want to sound like you’re bragging…but writing, being a writer, is all about the hustle. So it’s important you showcase what others are saying about your work pre-release, to try to get folks excited. This is the game.
That being said, I am enormously proud and humbled—in addition to praise from Matthew Gavin Frank (which I gushed about previously)—to receive praise from authors Peter Geye and Urban Waite, two folks I admire greatly and whose kind words mean so, so much to me:
“Tough as rawhide, coiled like a diamond back, and spare as the New Mexico desert, this taut novel is as loaded as the Dance revolver its wounded hero wields. Russell is a writer on the rise, with a voice and vision sure to entrance every reader who lays eyes on this book. I’m already pining away for his next one.” —Peter Geye, author of The Lighthouse Road and Safe from the Sea
“Robert James Russel’s Mesilla reads like young James Lee Burke—action so sharp readers might as well pull their fingers from the page looking for blood. A fine story of revenge in the old west, salvation hoped for, but not easily achieved.” —Urban Waite, author of Sometimes the Wolf
Mesilla will be dropping in late September, and I absolutely can’t wait to share it with the world.