The first volume of Gregory Hill’s award-winning Strattford County Series, East of Denver is an unflinching look at rural America, a poignant, darkly comic tale about a father and son finding their way as their livelihood slowly disintegrates. When Stacey “Shakespeare” Williams returns to his family’s farm to bury his dead cat, he finds his prematurely-senile father living in squalor. There’s no money, the land is fallow, and what the hell happened to the old man’s beloved Cessna airplane? With no job and no prospects, Shakespeare becomes caretaker to his father and the farm. Drawn by desperation to reunite with a misfit crew of old classmates—losers, same as he—and motivated by boredom as much as by revenge, Shakespeare hatches a half-serious plot to rob the town bank. What ensues is all kinds of funny: peculiar, ha-ha, and why-am-I-crying.