All in the family

Author Monte Schulz has the creative goods. And it should come as no surprise, really, since his father is beloved Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. Although it took 18 years for Monte to release his second novel, This Side of Jordan, he’s established himself as an artist in his own right, though I’m sure it didn’t hurt to know the publisher of The Complete Peanuts. As with his first book, Down by the River, this second weaves a crime thriller with a picturesque American tale. Set before the 1929 stock-market crash, protagonist Alvin Pendergast, a 19-year-old Midwestern farm boy with tuberculosis, becomes entangled with a gangster on a bank-robbing and murdering binge, and eventually meets a dwarf named Rascal. Like a tour guide through pre-Depression America, Schulz details America’s shift from rural to urban life nearly 80 years ago.