Leon Hubbard had it coming. So when the arrogant and near psychotic youth is killed on a South Philadelphia construction site in front of the whole crew, everyone who knows him wants to bury the bad news with the body. All, that is, except two people: Leon's mother and the local columnist, a drunk on a mission. Because only a mother could love a boy like that. And only a crusading outsider would dream of digging too deeply into the mean streets and wasted lives of the neighborhood they call God's Pocket.
The sun was rising over Moat County, Florida, when Sheriff Thurmond Call was found on the highway, gutted like an alligator. A local redneck was tried, sentenced, and set to fry.
Then Ward James, a hotshot investigative reporter for the Miami Times, returns to his rural hometown with a death row femme fatale who promises him the story of the decade. She's armed with explosive evidence and aims to free-and meet-her convicted "fiancé."
With Ward's disillusioned younger brother Jack as their driver, they barrel down Florida's back roads and seamy places in search of the Story, racing flat out into a shocking head-on collision between character and fate as truth takes a backseat to headline news.
Warren Spooner was born after a prolonged delivery in a makeshift delivery room in a doctor's office in Milledgeville, Georgia, on the first Saturday of December, 1956. His father died shortly afterward, long before Spooner had even a memory of his face, and was replaced eventually by a once-brilliant young naval officer, Calmer Ottosson, recently court-martialed out of service. This is the story of the lifelong tie between the two men, poles apart, of Spooner's troubled childhood, troubled adolescence, violent and troubled adulthood and Calmer Ottosson's inexhaustible patience, undertaking a life-long struggle to salvage his step-son, a man he will never understand.
In Philadelphia city, 1961, a division of power exists between the Italian mobs and the predominantly Irish labour leaders. When the youngest daughter of union man Charley Flood is accidentally killed by one of the Mafia's cops it is the beginning of a suicidal chain of retaliation.
A respected white citizen of Cotton Point, Georgia, Paris Trout is a shopkeeper, a money-lender, and a murderer of blacks. And his friends, family and foes do not realize the danger they face in a man who simply will not see his own guilt.
Pete Dexter, the author of The Paperboy, sets this piece of fiction noir in a Los Angeles that comes straight out of the 1950s. A dark, gripping novel, it brings together a black caddy named Train, a police detective called the 'Mile Away Man,' and Norah Still, the only survivor of a bloody boat hijacking, whom the detective must keep tabs on'even as he is falling in love with her.
