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MWSA Review Pending
Author's Synopsis
The story is one of solid history, a battle of minds and survivor's guilt more than it is firefights and napalm. Rudyard Kipling, the India-born British journalist and writer said it a century ago: "No one knows what the truth is until someone writes a story." The Tilted Palace is that story. The Vietnam War was the flashpoint for the 1960s and '70s. Civil rights, the draft, and "Don't trust anyone over thirty" was the times.
Jimmy Ray Crandall and his generation were the first to lose a war. That his nose is rubbed in that fact lives and breeds in his mind. They had not lost; just ask Jimmy Ray. He spouts the truth that America cannot hear. Tonight is 30 April, 1990, exactly fifteen years after the war ended. A stray dog interrupts the bottle of Jack Daniels and Jimmy Ray's intention with the .45 Cold, Model 1911, sitting and calling to him from the kitchen table. A preacher then gets into it. A woman.
Flashbacks portray teenage Viet Cong sappers and a nemesis Viet Minh or two from the previous Indochina war. Le Chang, a lowly charcoal burner cannot appease either side. Assassination is his response to a perverted South Vietnam government and a deadly Communist crowd, both corrupt and both using and taxing him. It is victimization for all.
Back in Vietnam after all this time, it finally comes together.
Format(s) for review: Paper or Kindle
Review genre: Fiction—Historical Fiction
Pages/Word count: 279 / 104,145