‘BOURBON THIEF’ IS INTOXICATINGLY SEDUCTIVE

“The Bourbon Thief” by Tiffany Reisz (MIRA Books, 379 pages, in stores)

Tiffany Reisz has become an international best-selling author with her Original Sinners series. In her new novel, “The Bourbon Thief,” she brings us a Southern gothic tale of a wealthy Kentucky family, heirs to a bourbon distilling fortune, and its twisted past.

On a hot summer night in a bar that he owns, Duncan McQueen meets a mysterious woman named Paris — dark, beautiful and dressed in red. He brings her to his home for the night, wakes up alone the next morning and finds that his prized possession, the first-ever distilled bottle of Red Thread Bourbon, valued at $1 million, is gone.

His security people apprehend Paris before she can leave his house, and she tells McQueen the story of Red Thread Bourbon and why she thinks this first bottle rightfully belongs to her.

Paris tells the story of the Maddox family, former owners of Red Thread Bourbon before it went out of business. In 1978, Tamara Maddox, 16, was the last descendant of the family. Her father killed himself three years before, and her mother was helping Tamara’s grandfather preserve the family’s wealth and power.

Tamara showed an interest in Levi Shelby, the hired hand who managed the Maddox stables. Her mother’s rage over this started a sequence of events that forever changed the family.

The Kentucky River flooded the Maddox estate but Tamara survived to find out the true and terrible story of Red Thread Bourbon.

When I read the first chapter or so of this book, I kept thinking, “I don’t want to read this. It’s just trashy.” But, of course, I kept reading. The story has plenty of explicit, erotic sex scenes, rape and an unusual amount of incest. Once that was established, the Red Thread story was interesting. Or maybe it was the fact that at least there was a story.