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'Exceptional' Crime Review on The FighterA crooked nose. Scar slices across his forehead. Jack Boucher, he whispered and he shook his head. You ain't nothing but a broken down dirty dog.Le Boucher, he said to himself in the rearview mirror. The butcher.Jack Boucher, a washed-up bare-knuckle fighter, is battling against decades of drug and alcohol abuse when he returns home to find his world in ruins.Set against the desolate backdrop of the Mississippi Delta, the foster mother who saved Jack as a child now rests in a hospice.Her mind eroded by dementia, the family legacy she entrusted to Jack is now owned by banks and strangers.And Jack's own mind is failing.Following a lifetime of fighting, concussion after concussion has forced him to carry around a notebook of names warning him who can be trusted and who should be considered a foe.In a single twisted night, after losing the money that would have cleared his debt with the queen of Delta vice, Jack's life is quickly derailed.Forced into the fighting pit one last time, the stakes are nothing less than life or death. "Jack the Jaw" faces his biggest challenge yet as he must once again fight for his life and everything that was taken from him.A brilliant, gripping novel of endurance and redemption, The Fighter is set to be a major film in 2023 titled Rumble in the Dark starring actors Bella Thorne and Aaron Eckhart.Praise for Michael Farris Smith:'Equal parts brutal and beautiful and harrowing' Chris Whitaker'As violent as it is poetic' James Sallis'Powerful and lingering' New York Journal of Books'Smith...excels in this dark and violent Southern grit-lit thriller.' The Library Journal'Crisply written tale of thwarted lives and rawboned courage' Booklist

'You will not be disappointed' - Daily MailFrom the author of Desperation Road, longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award 2017The acres and acres of fertile soil, the two-hundred year old antebellum house, both gone. And so is the woman who gave it to him. The foster mother who saved Jack Boucher from a childhood of abandonment now rests in a hospice. Her mind eroded by dementia, the family legacy she entrusted to Jack is now owned by banks and strangers. And Jack's mind has begun to fail, too, as concussion after concussion forces him to carry around a notebook of names that separate friend from foe.But in a single twisted night Jack is derailed. Losing the money that will clear his debt with the queen of Delta vice, and forcing Jack into the fighting pit one last time - the stakes nothing less than life or death. Praise for Michael Farris Smith'Smith's fiction is full of hard people in tough situations, but his obvious love of language and innately rhythmic prose lift his stories to a higher level' - Big Issue'Every once in a while an author comes along who's in love with art and written language and imagery... writers like William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx. You can add Michael Farris Smith's name to the list' - James Lee Burke, New York Times bestselling author of Creole Belle and The Tin Roof Blowdown'Cinema written all over it... A particularly good novel if you like whispering 'Sh*t...' in an incredulous voice' - Shortlist'One of those wonderful and rare books that's both a page turner and a novel of great depth and emotion. The Fighter is Southern Noir at its finest ' - Ace Atkins, bestselling author of the Quinn Colson series'The Fighter is a book I wish I'd written but am deeply grateful I got to read. It is a masterful portrait of place and character and how one influences the other, with language that is both brutal and tender at once' - Attica Locke, author of Black Water Rising and Pleasantville