'e~Just like his Gold Dagger award-winning tale of a murder, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter , Tom Franklin's new thriller The Tilted World , written with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly, immerses its readers in America's deep south. It's a thriller for those who like their fiction literary, or literary fiction for those who like their thrills . There are thrills and nail-biting aplenty in The Tilted World , as Dixie Clay finds herself spiralling deeper into danger, and as the Mississippi lunges for the top of the levee where the sandbaggers struggle to contain it. But from the chilly descriptions of the rain that drip from its pages, to its effortless recreation of prohibition-era America 'e" The Tilted World is a thriller to savour, not to rush through. Franklin and Fennelly's characters are each beautifully, fully realised, from Dixie Clay in all her tough isolation and her longing for a child 'e" Franklin wrote loneliness well in Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter too 'e" to Ingersoll, the blues-playing orphan. The threat of the rising Mississippi is fabulously ominous, the villains of the piece also suitably disturbing. Franklin comes garlanded with praise from the likes of Philip Roth and Dennis Lehane. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter was eminently worthy of its best crime novel of the year gong back in 2011, and teaming up with the prize-winning Fennelly for The Tilted World has created another novel whose presence stays long after it is put aside.

This is a drowning world of "murder and moonshine, sandbagging and saboteurs, dynamite and deluge" Franklin and Fennelly have given us and, as autumn draws in and the rain keeps falling, it's one to dive into with gleeful foreboding'e(tm) Observer.