Publication Date: September 12, 2023
Consumed with grief, driven by vengeance, a man undertakes an unrelenting odyssey across the lawless post–Civil War frontier seeking redemption in this fearless novel from the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of News of the World.
Union soldier John Chenneville suffered a traumatic head wound in battle. His recovery took the better part of a year as he struggled to regain his senses and mobility. By the time he returned home, the Civil War was over, but tragedy awaited. John’s beloved sister and her family had been brutally murdered.
Their killer goes by many names. He fought for the North in the late unpleasantness, and wore a badge in the name of the law. But the man John knows as A. J. Dodd is little more than a rabid animal, slaughtering without reason or remorse, needing to be put down.
Traveling through the unforgiving landscape of a shattered nation in the midst of Reconstruction, John braves winter storms and confronts desperate people in pursuit of his quarry. Untethered, single-minded in purpose, he will not be deterred. Not by the U.S. Marshal who threatens to arrest him for murder should he succeed. And not by Victoria Reavis, the telegraphist aiding him in his death-driven quest, yet hoping he’ll choose to embrace a life with her instead.
And as he trails Dodd deep into Texas, John accepts that this final reckoning between them may cost him more than all he’s already lost…
Sweeping. Lyrical. Poetic. Intense. All aptly describe the novel Chenneville by Paulette Jiles.
Set as the Civil War ends, Jean-Pierre (John) Chenneville is recuperating from a serious head wound caused by an explosion, being hit in the head with part of a boat chain. Jean-Pierre has spent months in a military hospital where he’s been since being wounded. After regaining consciousness, the next battle he faces is regaining memories, the function of his limbs, and the ultimate struggle of putting his life back together.
Jean-Pierre Chenneville is a St. Louis Creole, and after recovering sufficiently, he leaves the hospital to make his way home to Marais Tempe Claire. He’s arrived home from war, but for fear of affecting his recovery, a dark secret is being kept by those closest to him. When his uncle, Basile, arrives and reveals that Jean-Pierre’s sister, husband, and the baby named for Jean-Pierre have been viciously murdered and their bodies dropped into a spring, Jean-Pierre’s new mission is to track down and kill their murderer.
Allowing himself as much time at home as possible to recuperate, Jean-Pierre at last sets out on the trail of A.J. Dodd, alias Charles Bain or Charles Garoute. Across Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and into Texas, Jean-Pierre’s travels and all of the individuals he encounters along the way are chronicled in vivid, poetic detail. His desperation to find his sister’s killer is never outweighed by what he knows is the right way to conduct himself and always being a gentleman and caregiver when needed.
He meets several kind people along the way, including telegraph operator Aubrey Robertson. With Jean-Pierre’s ability to send and receive Morse code, the singing communication lines of the telegraph wires provide key communications, including a critical introduction to a beautiful female telegraph operator, Victoria Reavis. No matter what he encounters through his travels, Jean-Pierre’s intentions never waver.
His thoughts focus solely on vengeance.
Epic in feel and poetic in its descriptions, Paulette Jiles’ Chenneville is reminiscent of Winston Graham’s Poldark. Completely engrossing, the reader becomes absorbed in Chenneville’s feelings and experiences as he travels through a winter blizzard, rain, and mud and finds shelter wherever he can. The final leg of his quest carries him through the forests of east Texas to his journey’s end. While the writing was exquisite and the characters breathtakingly real, the ending was a bit of a letdown and not the satisfying climax I’d been anticipating and looking forward to for Jean-Pierre.
Chenneville is one powerful man’s intimate journey of experiences that stretch his physical and emotional endurance while effortlessly carrying the reader along for the ride—for better and . . . for worse. 
My website is paulettejiles.com. I review books and say shocking things and include outrageous pictures.
Paulette Jiles was born in Salem, Missouri, in the Missouri Ozarks. Raised in small towns in both south and central Missouri, she attended three different high schools, an exhausting process of social dislocation and fashion wobbles, and with relief graduated from the University of Missouri (KC) in Romance Languages. After graduation she worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto and in the far north of Ontario and in the Quebec Arctic, helping to set up village one-watt FM radio stations in the native language, Anishinabe and Inuktitut. She became reasonably conversant in Anishinabe but Inuktitut was just too much. Very hard. Besides she was only in the eastern Arctic for a year. Work in the north lasted about ten years all told.
She taught at David Thompson University in Nelson B.C. and grew to love the British Columbian ecosystems and general zaniness. She spent one year as a writer-in-residence at Philips Andover in Massachusetts and then returned to the United States permanently when she married Jim Johnson, a Texan. Has lived in Texas since 1995.
She and her husband renovated an old stone house in the San Antonio historic district and amidst the rubble and stonemasons and ripped-out electrical systems she completed Enemy Women. She now lives on a small ranch near a very small town in the Texas Hill Country with a horse and a donkey. If you want a free donkey, please let her know. She plays Irish tin whistle with a bluegrass group, sings alto in choir, rides remote trails in Texas with friends. Her horse is named Buck. News of the World (William Morrow) was a finalist for the National Book Award.
His name is Jean Louis.