East of Texas, West of Hell

Davis Rod

Description

The latest from prose stylist and accomplished novelist Rod Davis exposes the dark underbelly and underground economies of Gods country. A desperate call from heiress Elle Meridian shakes ex-Dallas TV anchor Jack Prine from his comfortable life in the Big Easy as he begins his long search for Meridians missing teenage daughter. Instead of the girl, Jack discovers the savaged bodies of drug dealers and embarks on a journey of relentless violence and lethal betrayal across the South. As an intricate web of deception, extortion, and murder unwinds, Prine finds himself at odds with neo-Nazis, the cartel, and the Dixie Mafia. Even if Prine can save Meridians child, can he justify the blood on his hands? Rod Davis expands the thrilling world of South, America in this Southern noir, rife with chaos, unexpected turns, and fascinating characters.

Sujets

• Political
• Politics

Informations

• Publié par: University of Georgia Press
• Date de parution: 30 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781588384171
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Praise for East of Texas, West of Hell
In East of Texas, West of Hell , Rod Davis crafts a story that begs you to look away but keeps you glued fast to the page with machete-sharp prose. Fans of South, America will relish the return of Davis s workmanlike, capable storytelling, while new readers will go clamoring for his every published word. Easily the best page-turner of the year. - E RYK P RUITT , author of What We Reckon
Jack Prine is on the road again, which is bad news for the bad guys he s hunting. Rod Davis s riveting new novel would best be read with Warren Zevon turned up loud. Send lawyers, guns, and money-and maybe a voodoo priest and a coroner. East of Texas, West of Hell should come wrapped in crime-scene tape, or its own body bag. - M ARK M CDONALD , award-winning journalist and author of Off the X
Rod Davis is the real deal, a storyteller of immense talent. East of Texas, West of Hell has it all: gripping characters, a page-turning plot, and a whole lot more. Don t miss this book. - H ARRY H UNSICKER , author of The Devil s Country and the former executive vice president of the Mystery Writers of America
Attention lovers of Southern noir, Grit Lit, or simply the pulse-pounding, twist-a-minute thriller: a master of the form is back with an edge-of-your-seat read. Rod Davis s East of Texas, West of Hell starts at full speed and never slows down. With a plot as complex and ultimately illuminating as the existential mysteries that Davis explores, East of Texas, West of Hell delivers not just a gripping story peopled with jump-off-the-page characters, but a heartfelt meditation on life, justice, and the murky areas in between. - S ARAH B IRD , award-winning author of Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen
Rod Davis s lead character Jack Prine takes us on a wild ride across the South from Savannah to the ranches of West Texas, following the blood-splattered trails of criminals, con men, lowlifes, fascists, and other troublemakers to save lives and right wrongs. A telling so fiery you can see the steam rising from the pages. - J OE N ICK P ATOSKI , author of Willie Nelson: An Epic Life and Austin to ATX
In East of Texas, West of Hell , Rod Davis goes assuredly into a landscape of crime fiction mapped by writers like Elmore Leonard and Ross MacDonald, but his own tough guy sleuth, Jack Prine, is an original. Prine is a compelling and entertaining narrator, an aging polymath well versed in violence but also Shakespeare and Buddhism. Brought to life in Davis s beautifully spare prose, he is hard to put down in more ways than one. - S EAN M ITCHELL , former reporter and critic for the Los Angeles Times and editor of Dallas s first alternative weekly, The Iconoclast
Davis s East of Texas is wild and sexy, his West of Hell harsh and lawless, but both needles in the compass remind us of the sort of invisible reality one single place can construct in perfect symbiosis. - D R . R UB N O LAGUE , former CNN correspondent and vice president for news at LBI Media
In his long career as a journalist and author, Rod Davis has always been a master of place. In East of Texas, West of Hell , his craft is again on display, painting deep, tactile pictures of oil patch motels, sticky riverfronts, and gleaming Southern cities. This skill marries beautifully with Davis s particular style of noir, at once languid and propulsive. He expertly sets a mood while fully defining the cast of wayward souls we meet along the way. This deepens the thrill of Jack Prine s journey through his beloved South on a self-described doomed rescue mission and righteous killing spree. This is Davis s greatest work to date. - E RIC C ELESTE , longtime city columnist and contributing editor, Dallas s D Magazine
E AST OF T EXAS , W EST OF H ELL
A LSO BY R OD D AVIS
American Voudou
Corina s Way
South, America

NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2020 by Rod Davis
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Davis, Rod, 1946- author.
Title: East of Texas, west of hell: a novel / Rod Davis.
Description: Montgomery : NewSouth Books, 2020 | Series: Jack Prine; book 2.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019058707 (print) | LCCN 2019058708 (ebook) | ISBN 9781588384164 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781588384171 (epub)
Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3604.A975 E22 2020 (print) | LCC PS3604.A975 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058707
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058708
First Printing
Design by Randall Williams
Printed in the United States of America
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About NewSouth Books
Just give me one thing that I can hold on to To believe in this living is just a hard way to go
A NGEL F ROM M ONTGOMERY , J OHN P RINE
1946-2020
E AST OF T EXAS , W EST OF H ELL
All life is suffering.
- F IRST N OBLE T RUTH
1
I squatted in the soggy backyard jungle behind the meth house and studied what was left of the two bodies. Nobody was around, and likely nobody had been. If so, they d left the remains as found-half-devoured by dogs or raccoons or whatever else roamed this battered neighborhood southwest of Atlanta s big towers and big money. The faces weren t really there anymore. Neither was most of her torso.
They were slumped at impossible anatomical angles against a vine-shrouded oak. I couldn t tell if they had been tortured or merely executed and mauled. The entry and exit wounds on each remained obvious. The male corpse was black, maybe Latino. The female was white, so it wasn t Rose. Which was a good thing. But a very bad thing if Rose had been mixed up with them. Or with whoever had done this.
First time I ever saw a dead body I vomited. I was twelve, volunteering in my small Texas town to search for a popular high school girl who d fallen into a flood-swollen river. Fish and turtles had gotten to her pretty bad.
All the kids had to write their names on sticker tags in case we, too, disappeared. My Jack Prine got blurred when I slipped into the water trying to get a better view, pissing off a fireman who had to grab me roughly by the arm just before I decorated his boots with my breakfast.
Subsequent years and jobs covering mortal mayhem as a TV reporter or covering up more extreme mayhem for the military had all but numbed the impact of witnessing human remains. Still, this was fucking barbaric.
Night was descending fast and I needed to move along, but I couldn t stop staring. I knew that led nowhere good. I shouldn t have been there in the first place. But I was. Elle had called.
It was almost 5 a.m. She was so shaken she could barely talk. She asked me to check on her runaway daughter without so much as a hello or hope-I-didn t-wake-you-up. As if we d had regular crack-of-dawn conversations instead of once-a-year awkward small talk around the holidays.
Could I come to Atlanta as soon as possible? She said she had been up all night making phone calls to Rose but nobody answered and now she thought Rose may or may not have been kidnapped. May or may not willingly have moved in with some kind of artistic wannabes, who may or may not have been dealing meth. She couldn t call the police either way. I made a lame joke about having heard that about the police three years ago, when I found her brother Terrell dead in a New Orleans gutter. How we met. But it just fell into a silence that confirmed how scared she was.
Flights were full and I barely booked one at double the usual fare on Delta to the Hartsfield airport. It got me into Atlanta by sundown and then to the address Elle had given me, which she said was the only thing she had.
Now darkness was closing in and I was staring at gore behind a house I almost couldn t find in a neighborhood that no longer mattered. I could hear thunder in the distance. Storms had been sweeping through the South for two weeks.
I eased slowly around the corpses. Waist-high weeds squished under the soles of my old Luccheses. Heavy rains had transformed the yard into a Rousseau canvas, primeval and lush and vivid and latent with violence. If the city had ever cited the place for code violations, nobody d done anything about it.
A dog barked somewhere down the street. That meant other dogs might still be in the yard. The gate at the side of the house was wide open. I d used it coming in. No canines, but it seemed likely that strays or worse would return with the night. I shifted my attention to the surrounding neighborhood, listened for any unusual sounds-alarms, loud voices, sirens. It was quiet enough for me to hear my own footfalls. The only real noise came from interstate traffic in the distance.
The house itself was also dark, except for the faint glow of an electric light, probably from an inner room. It gave just enough illumination to convince me the best and maybe only way to go in was from a torn screen door hanging ajar at the back porch, which was basically a concrete slab. I started walking that way when I noticed something in the shrubs nearest the tree.
I hoped what was sticking out wasn t another body part, and it wasn t. It was a machete. Blood and gore on the blade almost to the hilt. You can t carry sidearms on planes, so among other haste-driven omissions, I d come here without any kind of protection. This would do as a field expedient. I wiped it as clean as I could on the grass and went on to the house.
Behind the screen, the plywood door sported a smashed-in hole a