The Publisher Says: In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary Karr, a stunning memoir of a mother-son relationship that is also the searing, unflinching account of a murder and its aftermath

Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain’s death in her remote trailer, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. “A real-life old West murder mystery,” the local TV announcers intone before the commercial break, while barroom gossips snicker cruelly. But for her twenty-year-old son, Justin St. Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after.

Long after his mother’s death is “solved,” closure still seems missing. Distancing himself from the legendary town of his childhood, Justin makes another life a world away in San Francisco and achieves all the surface successes that would have filled his mother with pride. Yet years later he’s still sleeping with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he is pulled back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, a onetime army paratrooper, the type of woman who would stand up to any man except the men she was in love with? What led her to move from place to place, house to house, man to man, job to job, until finally she found herself in a desperate and deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of desert with an unstable ex-cop?

Justin’s journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of stepfathers who were a constant, sometimes threatening presence in his life, to a harsh world on the margins full of men and women all struggling to define what family means. He decides to confront people from his past and delve into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother’s life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be.

Brutally honest and beautifully written, Son of a Gun is a brave, unexpected and unforgettable memoir.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: I've read a goodly number of memoirs about hardscrabble childhoods...The Glass Castle for one, Cockroaches for a memorable other...but I was not entirely sure what to make of this one. Violence against women isn't uncommon, and the domestic violence that led Author St. Germain's mother to her death was part of an established pattern in her life. It seems very likely that she was an adrenaline junkie, a person whose emotional needs are met by the powerful stimulant our brain feeds us when we're afraid.

Seeking out the fear isn't that uncommon a trait. Many of us climb mountains or watch horror films. The author's mother seems to have gotten her high from relationships with abusive men. It's very sad and very dangerous, and in this case lethal.

The enormous trauma of Author St. Germain's upbringing, the immense psychic wound of his mother's murder at the hands of the man she chose to marry, and the...the strangely deficient paperwork trail her murderer's fellow cops present him with when he returns to the scene of the crime a decade on, all left me...flat. I wasn't used up, wrung out, the way I would've been if I'd been sobbing from the awfulness and waste of it all. I was just...flat.

I suspect the reason is that I wasn't fully drawn in to the story. I did not get past the stage of reading where I lost my sense of separateness, of being outside looking in. It's an alchemical thing that happens when I'm reading certain things. I can't identify why it did not occur this time.

I wished that it had; I expected it to because I liked the guy; if I ever met Justin, I'd want to hug him. But I was outside, looking in, and thus not 4-star-giving wrapped up in his story. ( )

Wonderful writing but, oh such a sad and haunting story. It has settled around me like a cloak. ( )

This was a really excellent memoir. Told in unflinching prose, I was sucked in from the first page. What a beautiful telling of such a tragic event. Highly recommend. ( )

In September 2001, twenty year-old Justin St. Germain receives news that his mother has been shot and killed in her Tombstone, Arizona trailer. Though evidence and witnesses are scarce, it appears that Debbie St. Germain's death came at the hands of her fifth husband, who quickly vanished, leaving behind Justin and his brother as the family's remains.

After relocating to San Francisco and starting a new life in the years following his mother's murder, Justin soon realizes that he can't simply wish away her death. He revisits Tombstone, where he recognizes that he knows more about Wyatt Earp and the tale that made the town famous than he does about his own mother. Working toward closure, St. Germain meets with men from his mother's past and digs into case files, filling in pieces of the stories only half seen from the eyes of a child.

"...sometimes I blame her, too - not Ray, but her - because she chose him in the first place. But what are the right choices? My mother married the first man she loved, had children, tried to make it work, to do what was expected. He left. After that she raised her kids. It cost her her youth, most of her dreams. It meant that when we were gone she had nobody else, nothing to do, nowhere to go. Men took everything from her, finally her life. Now men blame her for dying."

Filled with stark but powerful sentences, Son of a Gun is a memoir both haunting and captivating, tracing the journey from grief to acceptance with self-discovery in between.

Blog: www.rivercityreading.com ( )

For some reason I kept forgetting this was a memoir - maybe because it read more like a novel; maybe because, even though the subject was the murder of the author's mother by his stepfather, Germain felt oddly distant.

It was an interesting read, although the back details about Tombstone and Wyatt Earp felt like padding and slowed the pace down. ( )