“A Category 5 delight with a dazzling narrative voice, a keen sense of humor, and a pitch-perfect instinct for the fais-dos-dos of the human heart.” —Robert Olen Butler
Text Box: Logan’s Storm is a sequel to Meely LaBauve and a prequel to Junior’s Leg. It follows the story of Meely’s grieving father, Logan LaBauve, and Chilly Cox, the black teenager who takes Meely’s side in a fight with the predacious Junior Guidry, from the day they flee Catahoula Bayou for the swamps. Running, if unadvisable, is perhaps understandable: Logan, using wits and a shotgun, has just rescued his son and Chilly from a revenge plot by Junior and his crooked cop, Uncle, then wrecked his battered Dodge pickup as other cops chased the trio down the snaky, rutted Catahoula Bayou Road. Thanks to a flying alligator, the cops get the worse of the accident. But Logan, a game poacher already marked by the law, isn’t of a mind to hang around; he knows Junior and the racist Uncle will try to frame the whole lot of them. Meely, exhausted and hobbled by a broken leg he suffered in the Text Box: Praise for Logan’s Storm… “A Category 5 thriller.” —The Miami Herald “A Cajun flavored tall tale of the bayous...colorful and compelling...Wells has a gift for capturing his locale, and he gives us a spectacular tour.” —The St. Louis Post-Dispatch “The action never lets up.” —The New York Times “I discovered a wonderful new world, a place I had never even imagined. And, I discovered a writer whose language is as beautiful as his settings and characters are sometimes rough and troubling.” —Gena Christopher, The Anniston Star “With a tale redolent of the bayou and conjuring up the ghost of Mark Twain, Wells has concocted another winner.” —Library Journal “The pace of plotting will keep you glued to Logan’s Storm. The cast of characters are truly inspired.” —The Baton Rouge Morning Advocate “Wells serves up palpitation-inducing, board-up-the-windows excitement.” —The New Orleans Times Picayune “When you start a book neck deep in a swamp of cottonmouths, wasps, leeches and mosquitoes, you better have a good story to tell. Ken Wells does and he tells it with charm and vigor.” —The Seattle Times “An affectionate and rewarding character study, filled with outrageous adventures and humor.” —Booklist “An Odyssean adventure through the deepest parts of a swamp ...compelling.” —The Jackson (Miss.) Clarion Ledger

Jacket design by Honi Werner

@2002

wreck, bids his father and Chilly to go and decides to stay behind and tell their side of the story. Logan’s immediate goal is to evade the law and spirit Chilly up to Tupelo, Miss., where Chilly has relatives who will shelter him. But Logan must first guide them across a hundred miles of primal swamp in a tiny open boat with no more than a compass, a shotgun and his wits, and then traverse the tricky backroads of Louisiana and Mississippi—made trickier still by a white man afoot in the land with a black teenager in the pre-Civil Rights South.

       What follows is an odyssey of deprivation and adventure, laughter and revelation; a battle against the elements, hunger, ravenous insects and predators of all kinds, including a swamp-dwelling mad woman whose son practices a bizarre form of taxidermy, and an erudite Mississippi grifter.

       Logan then heads down to Florida to lay low himself, accompanied by Annie Ancelet, a real-life swamp angel who has given him temporary shelter and, for the first time since his wife died eight years ago, made him think twice about abandoning his long years of grief. But a killer hurricane rumbles out of the Gulf and into their path, forcing them to make harrowing choices that could cost them their lives, or the lives of others suddenly thrust into their care.  Told with Twain's flare for adventure and Welty's sense of place, Logan’s Storm is a romp through the swamps and a trip through the heart and soul of a singular American character.