Eli Cranor in conversation with John T Edge for Mississippi Blue 42

Overview

About the Book

Special Agent Rae Johnson grew up on football fields alongside her father, a national-championship-winning coach. Which is exactly why, fresh out of Quantico, she’s sent down to Compson, Mississippi, to investigate the illicit money flowing into a bustling football program in the heart of the Delta. But two days into the assignment things take a dire turn when UCM’s star quarterback is flung from the roof of a college bar, lands on a bag of money, and dies.

Hoping to turn a routine fraud case into a career-defining bust, Rae ingratiates herself with the fans, coaches, players, and politicians who make up the university’s complex social hierarchy. With rumors of corruption rustling through the kudzu vines, Rae soon realizes there’s more to the game than what she’d learned as a child. And in order to win, she’ll have to put all her father’s lessons to the ultimate test.

About the Author

Special Agent Rae Johnson grew up on football fields alongside her father, a national-championship-winning coach. Which is exactly why, fresh out of Quantico, she’s sent down to Compson, Mississippi, to investigate the illicit money flowing into a bustling football program in the heart of the Delta. But two days into the assignment things take a dire turn when UCM’s star quarterback is flung from the roof of a college bar, lands on a bag of money, and dies.

Hoping to turn a routine fraud case into a career-defining bust, Rae ingratiates herself with the fans, coaches, players, and politicians who make up the university’s complex social hierarchy. With rumors of corruption rustling through the kudzu vines, Rae soon realizes there’s more to the game than what she’d learned as a child. And in order to win, she’ll have to put all her father’s lessons to the ultimate test.

Nationally bestselling, Edgar Award–winning author Eli Cranor played quarterback at every level: peewee to professional. These days, he serves as the “Writer in Residence” at Arkansas Tech, where he also lends his eye—and sometimes, his arm—to the university’s football team. Eli’s column, “Where I’m Writing From,” appears weekly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. His previous works include Don’t Know Tough, Ozark Dogs, and Broiler.

About the Conversation Partner

John T Edge is the author of The PotLikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Publisher‘s Weekly, and a host of others. For twenty-two years, he served as a columnist for the Oxford American, and for three years he wrote the United Tastes column for the New York Times. He is director of the Mississippi Lab in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi, where his projects include the launch of Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, set on a parcel off land outside Oxford where William Faulkner once raised mules. From 1999 through 2021, he was director of the Southern Foodways Alliance. He is also the host of the television show TrueSouth on the SEC Network, ESPN, and Hulu. He lives here in Oxford.