Books with author T.M. Franklin

Bring the Monkey is a spoof of the English country-house mystery. The novel includes a host of characters, not to mention a monkey called Percy. Unexpectedly the room is suddenly plunged into darkness a bracelet goes missing and finally a dead body is found. Bring the Monkey is a quirky novel that digs at social conventions, class and snobbery. Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin was an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her novel My Brilliant Career. She was committed to the development of a uniquely Australian form of literature, and she actively pursued this goal by supporting writers, literary journals, and writers' organisations.

Abigail and her best friend Charlotte love horses. More than anything in the world, the girls want to learn how to ride real horses, not the pretend horses they’ve been riding around the school playground since first grade. As the school year ends and summer begins, the girls’ wish comes true. Abigail and Charlotte receive a gift of horse riding lessons at Collard Farm. The girls’ brothers, Max and Joey, have no interest in horses but are forced to visit Collard Farm against their will. The boys come to the farm angry and irritated to be pulled away from their video games and television. However, what they find at the farm surprises everyone, including themselves.And so begins a summer of magical adventures, new friendships and an unbreakable bond between Abigail and a horse named Majestic.

Amos, Mississippi, is a quiet town. Silas Jones is its sole law enforcement officer. The last excitement here was nearly twenty years ago, when a teenage girl disappeared on a date with Larry Ott, Silas' one-time boyhood friend. The law couldn't prove Larry guilty, but the whole town has shunned him ever since. Then the town's peace is shattered when someone tries to kill the reclusive Ott, another young woman goes missing, and the town's drug dealer is murdered. Woven through the tautly written murder story is the unspoken secret that hangs over the lives of two men - one black, one white. "Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter" is a masterful crime novel, sizzling with deep Southern menace, and distinguished by brilliant plotting and unforgettable characters.

It's 1911 and the secluded southwestern Alabama town of Old Texas has been besieged by a scabrous and malevolent character called E. O. Smonk. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty and goitered, Smonk is also an expert with explosives and knives. He abhors horses, goats and the Irish. Every Saturday night for a year he's been riding his mule into Old Texas, destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men—all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over and under rifle. At last the desperate citizens of the town, themselves harboring a terrible secret, put Smonk on trial, with disastrous and shocking results.Thus begins the highly anticipated new novel from Tom Franklin, acclaimed author of Hell at the Breech and Poachers. Smonk is also the story of Evavangeline, a fifteen-year-old prostitute quick to pull a trigger or cork. A case of mistaken identity plunges her into the wild sugarcane country between the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers, land suffering from the worst drought in a hundred years and plagued by rabies. Pursued by a posse of unlikely vigilantes, Evavangeline boats upriver and then wends through the dust and ruined crops, forced along the way to confront her own clouded past. She eventually stumbles upon Old Texas, where she is fated to E. O. Smonk and the townspeople in a way she could never imagine.In turns hilarious, violent, bawdy and terrifying, Smonk creates its own category: It's a southern, not a western, peopled with corrupt judges and assassins, a cuckolded blacksmith, Christian deputies, widows, War veterans, whores, witches, madmen and zombies. By the time the smoke has cleared, the mystery of Smonk will be revealed, the survivors changed forever.