Armadillo

"Stephen March takes a difficult theme and setting and makes it work brilliantly. These people come right off the page with a presence so realistic, you can almost smell them! An endearing and brutally honest narrator hosts this ribald romp through the backwoods of the upper South and provides us with as unique and challenging a set of characters ever to crawl out of the backseat of an abandoned Ford Fairlane with a jaw full of snuff and a gut full of cheap wine. The twisting and turning plot never drifts into cliche or offers even a whiff of predictability. This is just plain fun, but with a serious tone, sometimes even warm and always genuine. There's a marvelous sense of the ironic forming the whole, and, as is always the case when good triumphs over evil, there's a grin at the end." 
--Clay Reynolds, Series Judge