The Four Corners of the Sky by Michael Malone

From the Publisher

For the first time since his beloved novels Handling Sin and Dingley Falls, Michael Malone presents a riveting novel of love, secrets and the mysterious bonds of family. Starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, and rave response from devoted Malone fans.

The Washington Post - Michael Dirda

This is a fabulously entertaining novel. It's probably a trifle too long, the plot contains a number of improbabilities and it's easy enough to guess at least a couple of the revelations toward the book's end. But you know what? None of this matters. Michael Malone's prose—as smooth as a con man's patter—hooks you on the first page, and you're not going anywhere after that, except to your favorite reading chair or backyard hammock or vacation beach blanket. Malone possesses the only gift—according to Vladimir Nabokov—that a writer really needs: Shamantsvo, the ability to cast a spell, to enchant.

Publishers Weekly

A daredevil pilot heads out on a wild goose chase and learns to slow down and enjoy life in Malone's (The Last Noel) exuberant but ultimately unwieldy 10th novel. After years of accompanying her con artist father on his exploits, seven-year-old Annie is left on the family's North Carolina farm with her aunt Sam. Annie relishes the stability, but still craves excitement as she grows up, learning to fly the single-engine plane her father left her and becoming a navy fighter pilot. When her father calls years later, he claims that he's dying and needs her help with one last escapade. She agrees-in exchange for the name of the mother she's never known. Annie travels to St. Louis, Mo.; Miami; and Cuba in the service of her elusive father, meeting quirky eccentrics along the way, including her one true love. Bizarre coincidences, caricatured criminals and characters who spurt groan-worthy puns, classic movie lines and Shakespeare quotes in place of meaningful dialogue keep the novel teetering toward the absurd. The novel's ambitious blend of humor, mystery, adventure and sentimentality can be as exhausting as Annie's fast-paced flights. (May)

Rebecca Kelm - Library Journal

Navy pilot Annie P. Goode comes home for her 26th birthday to her doting aunt and uncle in Emerald, NC, exactly where her con man father, Jack Peregrine, left her 19 years earlier. But Jack's urgent message that he's dying and needs Annie to fly his old Piper Warrior to St. Louis upends her life. Annie agrees, hoping finally to learn the name of her mother. In a week's time, Annie finds herself in St. Louis, Miami, and Havana, always a step behind Jack, as everyone seeks a golden, gem-encrusted "Queen of the Sea" statue (think The Maltese Falcon). Malone (The Last Noel) employs his trademark cast of characters and wry humor, including using titles of old movies for his 55 chapters. This long novel could have used some serious editing, and a love scene or two between Annie and her Sergeant Hart would have been a welcome relief from the extensive Peregrine family history and the overuse of the f word. Purchase where Malone has an established following.

Kirkus Reviews

A long but satisfying tale of crime and death foretold that blends hints of The Great Santini, Top Gun and Fried Green Tomatoes with copious draughts of Shakespeare. Annie Peregrine Goode-a charged name, that-is a tough customer, but easy on the eyes. (Isn't that always the way?) So when a leering buffoon, rebuffed, steals a bit of tomato from her guacamole and makes Hannibal Lecter noises with it by way of expressing contempt, she is not at all above grabbing his wrist and "compressing nerves with an accuracy that the Navy had taught her." Well, the Navy is nothing if not thorough, and Annie, a flight instructor at Annapolis with a need for speed-beg pardon, a "passion for velocity"-in vehicles of every description, is prepared for just about any eventuality except for the sudden reappearance of her deadbeat dad, who gave her a model airplane when she was but a little girl and then split from their Carolina home. Malone (Theater Studies and English/Duke Univ.; The Last Noel, 2002, etc.) knows that the small-town South is a subject all unto itself, and no matter how eccentric the characters, they're wholly believable in that context-the kind who, say, board up windows in advance of a hurricane and then settle in for a film festival in the basement. ("Les Diaboliques. Clouzot. I've got a great print.") The amiably meandering narrative picks up speed-"Go, Annie P. Goode!"-when Dad reappears, now apparently dying. Peppering his pages with funny conversations, learned references to the Bard and keenly observed apercus about family life, memory, forgiveness and all the puzzling ways that love and friendship can twist and turn, Malone delivers a tale that takes a little long to tell but thatpays off nicely in the end. Secrets and intrigues among the honeysuckle: a sun-washed yarn of the New South, affectionately told.

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Prologue
July 4, 1982

In small towns between the North Carolina Piedmont and the coast the best scenery is often in the sky. On flat sweeps of red clay and scrub pine the days move monotonously, safely, but above, in the blink of an eye, dangerous clouds can boil out of all four corners of the sky and do away with the sun so fast that, in the sudden quiet, birds fly shrieking to shelter. The flat slow land starts to shiver and anything can happen.

In such a storm, on Annie Peregrine's seventh birthday, her father gave her the airplane and minutes later drove out of her life.

When thunder scared her awake she found herself in their convertible, parked atop a hill near a barn. Off in the distance rose a large white house with a wide white porch. A white
pebble road curved away behind the car, unreeling like ribbon on a spool. Annie looked past two rows of rounded black trees to where fields of yellow wheat spilled to the edge of the sky. Her father and she must have arrived at Pilgrim's Rest, the Peregrine family house in Emerald, North Carolina, toward which they'd been driving all day.

Sliding from their car, she saw him, slender and fast-moving, his white shirt shimmery, as he ran toward her out of the barn and across the dusky yard.

"Annie!" Reaching her, her father dropped to his knees and hugged her so fiercely that her heart sped. "I'm in trouble. I've got to leave you here a little while with Aunt Sam and Clark. Okay?"

She couldn't speak, could only shake her head. How often had he told her that the house where he had grown up, that Pilgrim's Rest had been for him a pit of snakes, a cage of tigers?

He kept nodding to make hernod too. "Okay? I'll be back. Just hang onto your hat." Pulling a pink baseball cap from his pocket, he snuggled it down onto her head. Colored glass beads spelled ANNIE above its brim; a few beads were missing, breaks in the letters.

Across the driveway a tall woman with short thick hair banged open the large doors of the barn. She called out to Annie's father. "Jack? Jack! Jack! Jack!"

Annie's father turned her around to face the woman but kept talking with that nodding intensity that always meant they would need to move fast. "See my sister Sam over there? I told you how nice she is." The sound of sharp thunder flung the child back into the man's arms. "So's Clark. They'll take care of you. I'll call you. Remember, you're a flyer." He yanked her small hard blue suitcase out of the convertible, dropping it onto the gravel beside her. "Give Sam the cash."

"Stop it. Where are you going!"
"Annie, I know. It's rotten." A drop of rain fell on his face like a fat fake tear. Drops splattered on the suitcase's shiny clasps. "Go look in the barn. There's a present for you. 'Sorry, no silver cup.' "

She kicked him as hard as she could. And then she kicked over the blue suitcase. "I want to go with you," she said. "You!" But before she could stop him, her father had run to their car and was driving away.

She raced after the Mustang, down the pebble road between the dark rows of large oak trees. It was hard to make her voice work loudly but finally it flamed up her throat and she could shout at him to come back. She was already crying, already knowing she couldn't run fast enough.

Behind her, the tall woman named Sam kept calling, "Jack! Jack!"

Annie echoed her, hoping it would help. "Dad! Dad!"

The convertible braked to a skidding stop, her father twisting around in the seat to call out, "Your birthday present's in the barn, go look in the barn! Annie! Don't forget. You're a flyer!"

She screamed as loudly as she could, "You stop!"

The wind caught his scarf as he sped off; it flew into the air behind him. Then he was gone and the green silk scarf lay coiled near her feet. She ground it into the pebbled road with her small leather cowboy boots; they were as green as the scarf and stitched with lariats. She had wanted these boots so badly that only a week ago her father had turned their car around, drove them back fifty miles to some small town in the middle of a flat
state; he took her to the store where she'd seen the boots in the window and he bought them for her. "Never wait to say what you want," he told her. "It's no fun to go back. And sometimes you can't."

But now she'd said what she wanted and he'd left her anyhow. Dust and rain stung Annie's eyes shut and the world turned black.