Jake Eliam spent a lifetime in baseball, until a chance turn that led him into the Atlanta neighborhood known as ChickenBone, where he ended up a part time private investigator thanks to a timely meeting with the man everybody called Catfish, the owner of the legendary 3 Pigs BBQ. Now Catfish feeds him a case every now and then, and pulled pork sandwiches almost every day.When the top big league prospect for the Atlanta Peaches is killed in a car accident, two weeks after being cal...

Billy Ray Kincaid is in the catbird seat. He owns the TV Sports Network, BTSN, and employs Cissy, with just one name, a sexy young sideline reporter with big ambitions but little talent. BTSN televises the top college football game each week, But the self proclaimed turnaround artist who made his fortune by stripping down small factories and firing people went cheap and now BTSN is about to go bust. Enter Jake Eliam, a lifetime baseball man, who scrapes by making baseball bats on the edge ...

Jimmy Lee Hickam grew up along Red Dog Road, a dead-end strip of gravel and mud buried deep in the bowels of Appalachian Ohio. It is the poorest road, in the poorest county, in the poorest region of the state. To make things worse, the name Hickam is synonymous with trouble. Jimmy Lee hails from a heathen mix of thieves, moonshiners, drunkards, and general anti-socials that for decades have clung to both the hardscrabble hills and the iron bars of every jail cell in the region. This life, ...

Won Book of the Year Adult Non-Fiction—2012 Indie Choice AwardsAmazon Best Book of the Month February 2011"Dubus relives, absent self-pity or blame, a life shaped by bouts of violence and flurries of tenderness."—Vanity FairAfter their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their overworked mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and everyday violence. Nearby, his father, an eminent autho...

There is a big old sledding hill not more than two or three good snowballs’ worth of distance from our home, just behind Hank Macabee’s house. That hill was waiting for me and my brand new toboggan. It’s one of those sneak-up kind of hills with a long slow ride down that picks up speed as it goes with a bump-hump at the end that you never see coming.I didn’t see what was coming next, either.The Christmas tree crashed through Hank Macabee’s bay window. The tree stand clatter...

Book 2 in the Dead Highways seriesJimmy and his group of survivors begin to head west. Destination: New Orleans.But the passage won’t be without its share of pitfalls. The roads are crowded with packs of infected. And to make matters worse, the virus may be entering a second stage—one where no one is immune.Relationships will be put to the test. Tough choices will be made. In this new world where hope is the currency, it's hard not to be penniless.

This story collection explores the violent underbelly of America's heartland: "A dark, hard-boiled debut . . . no doubt about it, Frank Bill can write." — Kirkus ReviewsWelcome to heartland America circa right about now, when the union jobs and family farms have given way to meth labs, backwoods gunrunners, and bare-knuckle brawling. Frank Bill's southern Indiana is haunted with the deep, abiding sense of place, and his people are men and women pre...

One day, Richard LeMieux had a happy marriage, a palatial home, and took $40,000 Greek vacations. The next, he was living out of a van with only his dog, Willow, for company. This astonishingly frank memoir tells the story of one man's resilience in the face of economic disaster. Penniless, a failed suicide, estranged from his family, and living "the vehicular lifestyle" in Washington state, LeMieux chronicles his journey from the Salvation Army kitchens to his days with "C"-a philosopher ...

In this superbly crafted DC noir, hard-drinking Nick Stefanos is hired to find a friend's missing wife—if he doesn't hit rock bottom first.Nick Stefanos has given up his job in sales to tend bar at the Spot, where drinks and women are both a bit too easily available, and the routine is starting to feel as dead-end as his last gig.But things are about to change. First, his high-school friend Billy Goodrich asks him to find his wife April, who he says left hi...

A young boy spends his tenth summer on his aunt and uncle's farm, where he is constantly involved in crazy escapades with his cousin Harris. "On the Larson farm, readers will experience hearts as large as farmers' appetites, humor as broad as the country landscape and adventures as wild as boyhood imaginations. All this adds up to a hearty helping of old-fashioned, rip-roaring entertainment."-- Publishers Weekly

In The Vender who Cried One-Percenter (a twist on Aesop's tale), a lonely youth tries to attact attention to his booth. In Little Red and the Big Bad Biker, Little Red races a biker to Grandma's house. In Who Wants a Road Trip, Red Skull is ready for a road trip, but are his friends? In Motorella, how could a penniless orphan find her way to a true friend?

Starvation LakeIn the dead of a Michigan winter, pieces of a snowmobile wash up near the crumbling, small town of Starvation Lake—the same snowmobile that went down with Starvation's legendary hockey coach years earlier. But everybody knows Coach Blackburn's accident happened five miles away on a different lake. As rumors buzz about mysterious underground tunnels, the evidence from the snowmobile says one thing: murder.Gus Carpenter, editor of the local news...