GEORGE & RUE

Hardback. A novel. The facts were clear. It was, by all accounts, a "slug-ugly" crime: in 1949, George and Rufus Hamilton bludgeoned a taxi driver to death with a hammer in the dirt-poor settlement of Barker's Point, New Brunswick. Less than 8 months later, the brothers were hanged for their crime. George and Rue's brutal act lives on in New Brunswick over half a century later, where the murder site is still known as "Hammertown". The author draws from this disturbing chapter in Canadian history in his first novel, brilliantly reimagining the lives - and deaths - of the two brothers, shifting seamlessly through the killers' pasts, examining just what kind of forces would reduce these men to lives of crime, violence, and ultimately murder. We also come to know the story of an impoverished African Canadian community powerless to help its people, and of a white community bent on viewing all blacks as dangerous outsiders. Illus. 223pp. 8vo. h/back. From the library of true-crime writer, Wilfred Gregg, with his personal b/plate. F. in f. dw.