Second Lies the Son

By: Matt Phillips

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Paperback | 8 November 2025

At a Glance

Paperback
196 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
20.3 x 13.3 x 1.14

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Set in the high deserts of California, Second Lies the Son is a tale of small-town friendship, love, disloyalty, and violence. Sam and Hayes grow up together-brothers in spirit. But their lives take different turns. Sam fumbles his way to family and work. Hayes bloodies his hands in Afghanistan. Returned a reluctant war hero, Hayes is dead set on avenging his conversion into an instrument of war. Sam tries to head off his best friend's brutal plans, but the haunting sins of his own past come calling. From one of America's authentic noirists, Second Lies the Son depicts the irredeemable violence of American masculinity and tracks that violence to the darkest depths of cold-blooded murder.

Industry Reviews

"A grizzled, tightly-wound account of two men struggling with an unforgiving world." - Kirkus Reviews

"Phillips knows his way around the dark recesses of the heart." - Tough Crime

"[Phillips] explores that gray place in American society where lines between good and bad, worthy and worthless, blur, and become as arbitrary as circumstances into which a person is born." - ReedsyDiscovery

"...a slow-burning 'grit lit' masterwork exploring the bounds of friendship, the gravitational pull of rural poverty, and generational violence passed from father to son..." - JD Clapp, author of Poachers and Pills

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