"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 'fianc├®.'
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."
"National Book Award-winning author Pete Dexter excels at writing eccentric characters and comical, yet touching, prose. In Spooner, Dexter weaves the tale of Warren Spooner, a troubled boy whose father dies shortly after he's born. When his mother marries Calmer Ottosson, a decorated Navy officer fallen from grace, Warren is saved by Calmer's inexhaustible patience. As Warren grows up, the two men forge a bond that will carry them both through the hard times ahead."
"Train is a 18-year-old black caddy at an exclusive L.A. country club. He is a golf prodigy, but the year is 1953 and there is no such thing as a black golf prodigy. Nevertheless, Train draws the interest of Miller Packard, a gambler whose smiling, distracted air earned him the nickname 'the Mile Away Man.' Packard's easy manner hides a proclivity for violence, and he remains an enigma to Train even months later when they are winning high stakes matches against hustlers throughout the country. Packard is also drawn to Norah Still, a beautiful woman scared in a hideous crime, a woman who finds Packard's tendency toward violence both alluring and frightening. In the ensuing triangular relationship kindness is never far from cruelty."
"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."
