Anticipation is high for Lou Berney’s novel ‘November Road’
Brooklyn BookBeat
For crime writer and Oklahoma native Lou Berney, there’s something special about the drive out West.
“I love that stretch of I-40, what used to be Highway 66, from Oklahoma City to Arizona,” he told The Associated Press during a recent interview. “I remember hearing about the painted desert when I was a kid, and thinking, ‘Oh my god, there’s a painted desert somewhere!’ It was so magical. The petrified forest. It had this myth for me.”
People travel in Berney’s books, although not always because they want to do so. “November Road,” his new novel, is set in 1963. It tells of an Oklahoma woman on the run from her husband, an underling to New Orleans-based mobster Carlos Marcello, who is trying to make himself vanish in the wake of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. They’re both heading West, and encounter each other in Las Vegas, where JFK was known to spend some free time.