John Pritchard

Junior Ray Loveblood returns in this follow-up to Junior Ray, the 2005 debut novel by John Pritchard. Equally profane and unintentionally profound, the fictional narrator of Pritchard's novel lives in the complex stew of evolving race relations, failed economies, and corrupt politics that define much of the post-civil rights rural Deep South — in Junior Ray's case, specifically in the Mississippi Delta. In Junior Ray, Loveblood, a white racist deputy sheriff, and his sidekick, Voyd, pursued and tried to kill a shell-shocked war veteran. Now, in a setting some years later, Loveblood is semi-retired and working as a security guard in one of the floating casinos that have replaced cotton as the cash crop in the Mississippi Delta. And in his spare time, Junior Ray has become an amateur historian, fascinated with the ill-fated Yazoo Pass expedition by a Union armada up the Mississippi River in 1863.