ABOUT THE BOOK

"It's like dyin' old men all over the world will tell you - when you get aged and rackety and think back across your entire lifespan, why it ain't the ones you do, you regret, it's the ones you don't." Lunch Pumphrey is talking about sex, but he applies his philosophy to all aspects of life - which includes dealing with anyone who has the dim wit to double cross him and the bad luck to stick around for the consequences.

And that's why old John X. Shade is on the lam, his nubile young wife having run off with $47,000 of Lunch Pumphrey's ill gotten gains, leaving John X. behind with an empty safe and a wise-ass daughter, the fruit of his middle age. Given a certified sociopath like Lunch on his tail, an empty bank account and hands too shaky to hold the pool cue that once made his fame and fortune, John X. has only one way to go: Home to the first wife and three sons - now grown - he abandoned years ago, back to the steamy bayou town of St Bruno.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

'Woodrell alternates between reaming the language with a dry corncob and practising a particularly skilful kind of literary cabinetwork.' - E Annie Proulx

"...but let's agree on Woodrell as the foremost exponent of the poetry of trailer-park trash. Woodrell does the best 'country noir' prose there is, and if you want to be hip read him now..." - Susie Maguire, Southern Daily Echo

"Woodrell proves once again that he's one of the finest exponents of American noir writing. His seductive and deceptively lazy style lulls the reader into a false sense of security - and then hits him below the belt. In short, he's an original and first-rate story-teller." - Irish News

"Jane Austen saw far less violence in her world, but move her to South Carolina and you'll get some idea of what Daniel Woodrell is up to." - The Spectator

"Terrific." - Literary Review

"Daniel Woodrell is a storyteller of bristling imagination and muscular prose, who uses the poetically profane language of the trailerpark to wicked effect. " - Bizarre

"At a time when the two dominant strands of male American fiction to emerge in the last couple of decades - contemporary noir and dirty realism - have largely lapsed into self-parody, a writer from the Ozark mountains of Missouri has come along to resuscitate them both." - John Williams, The Independent

every bit as sharp and twisted as the best of Jim Thompson or Charles Williams...what Daniel Woodrell's come back with are some of the finest, toughest books in American fiction today." - John Williams, Time Out