“Although based on a notorious true crime case, Remains is first and foremost a novel and Jim Cheney expertly draws on all the power and resources of the form to conjure up a complex, heartbreaking story of one community’s descent into moral hell. His multi-voiced, kaleidoscopic account of these terrible events is compelling and unforgettable,”

- Alan Glenn, author of Bloodland, which won the Irish Crime Novel of the Year 2011

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“Jim Cheney’s new novel, Remains, doesn’t claim to offer easy answers. Instead, Cheney uses the true story as the spine for a brooding, tightly wound narrative that probes the deeper psychological fault lines of small-town life. His earlier novels showcased his gift for character and pacing; Remains brings those strengths to bear on real events, threading fact and fiction with remarkable skill.

This is not a straightforward true-crime retelling. Cheney is more interested in the emotional terrain — the denial, the complicity, the quiet horrors that lurk behind manicured lawns and polite church handshakes. His characters are fully alive: flawed, maddening, strangely sympathetic. Cheney understands that what festers beneath the surface is often more frightening than anything overt.”

-JD Headrick

If you would like to interview Jim Cheney, please contact Barbara Esteves-Moore at bem@tworoadscommunications.com or 615-631-4383.

Inspired by true crime accounts such as In Cold Blood and Executioner’s Song, Remains is a work of fiction based on real events. Those events took place in the winter of 2002, when Georgia authorities encountered one of the most grewsome crime scenes in the country’s history – operators of the Tri-State Crematory in North, Georgia, recklessly discarded 339 corpses on their property instead of cremating the bodies.

What unfolded in the aftermath became an international spectacle. The actual crime was not a mystery to be solved – that much was evident – it was the lack of motive that captured so much attention. Remains turns that true crime into an imagined story of a family living in a small rural town in North Georgia trying to survive, keep a business afloat and maintain appearances. The story takes readers back in time before the crime began. It attempts to understand and make sense of the madness that overtook the operators at Tri-State by creating characters who are conflicted and, ultimately, trapped by their own actions and inactions. The reader meets all the characters who circled around the crime and enabled or ignored what was happening so they could either make a buck or keep the peace. The book is a character study of human nature, the inner workings of families and how life’s circumstances can impair ones ability to think clearly. As in the real-life crime investigation, the novel searches for a motive and readers get to go along for the ride.