2012 Nebraska Book Award When the salvage crew finally arrived, they found the dead man and a half-sunken sailboat overflowing with receipts, journals, letters, lists, school notes— a lifetime's accumulation of paper. Later, the woman's body would be found. Brent Spencer's father died as mysteriously as he had lived. Armed only with the soggy scraps of his father's life, Spencer began a two-thousand-mile search for the man he never really knew. Rattlesnake Daddy is about that journey— a powerful, heartfelt, and often funny meditation on the bonds that unite and the boundaries that divide all fathers and sons. "Rattlesnake Daddy is a real page-turner, and like the best mysteries it pushes aside the grim fact of death in favor of the life-affirming attempt to understand."─Oronte Churm, Inside Higher Ed "Powerful and moving. Spencer writes like a bruised angel."--Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World and Writing the Sacred Into the Real "Brent Spencer's Rattlesnake Daddy paints a wonderfully vivid portrait of a chaotic, colorful, venomous man who was the author's absent father. Spencer turns his father's nomadic life and puzzling death in the Florida Keys into a true-life mystery story, rendered with quiet clarity, deep compassion, and a pitch-perfect voice. Spencer's writing is truly exquisite."--Dinty Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire and The Accidental Buddhist "'A father is the mystery his son never solves,' Spencer writes. But in this haunted and haunting memoir/detective story, he comes as close as he can without actually crawling into his father's rattlesnake skin."--Robin Hemley, author of Do-Over! and Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness "Rattlesnake Daddy is the compelling story of a son's chase, a journey into secrets and mysteries and the venom of the past, present, and future. It is also an attempt at intimacy and understanding. Populated with a cast of remarkable characters and a sequence of stunning scenes, Rattlesnake Daddy is unforgettable for its clear-sighted contemplation of the sins of the father, and in their wake, the complicated yearnings of the son."--Lee Martin, author of From Our House and The Bright Forever "Rattlesnake Daddy is amazing. Alternately horrifying, funny, analytical, and heart-wrenching, it skillfully and affectingly tells a father-son story like none I've ever encountered: of a cruel and menacing psychopath who managed to seem not just sane but admirable, and of a son who overcame endless varieties of torture to write this stunning memoir of good riddance. Out of what Brent Spencer calls his father's "catalogue of mysteries," he has crafted a literary form of exorcism that is nothing less than a masterpiece."--Ron Hansen, author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Exiles Brent Spencer is the author of All Done with Dying and The Lost Son , novels,and Are We Not Men? , a collection of short fiction chosen as one of thebest books of the year by the The VillageVoice . His work has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, TheAtlantic Monthly, GQ, Missouri Review, Epoch , The Southern Review,  and elsewhere. He writes fiction, creative non-fiction, and screenplays, and teaches creativewriting at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.