No Exit Press - Down on Ponce by Fred Willard

ABOUT THE BOOK

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Sam Fuller is a retired marijuana smuggler who has never figured out if it was a bomb or just a leaking gas line that blew up his boat, nearly drowned him and killed his closest friends. He did know that the Colombians were ruthlessly rolling over independent gangs, making it a good time for him to leave town — especially since he was still alive, but...officially dead. After digging up his crew's small fortune buried in plastic trash bags in the palmetto scrub, he ran like hell up the Florida coast, feeling like the Angel of Death was about to tap his shoulder for a dance.

When a man offers him $30,000 to kill his wife, a fatal series of events leads Fuller to go into hiding on Atlanta's Ponce de Leon Avenue. Called Ponce by locals, it is a haven for the homeless, the lawless and the restless. Fuller accidentally gets involved in the disintegrating operation of a Dixie mob boss, Billy "Dong" Chandler, and a struggle for control between Chandler and the respectable businessmen who have been laundering his money. He knows that Chandler must have an enormous cache of money hidden somewhere, and he wants to do the right thing — steal it.

While the pros are busy killing each other, he assembles a crew of hopeless characters . Men who know they are human discards — a rockabilly ex-con... an escapee from a federal mental hospital...and two disabled street people. One can't walk. The other (missing half his face) can't speak. But they have one common goal: to find the money and use it to change their lives. Together, they mount a frantic chase that careens between the twisted, the brutal, the slapstick, the surreal, the tough and the serene — and hurtles toward the death of a mad man and the recovery of an illegal fortune.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

'A dazzling debut novel, a rollercoaster ride through an underworld filled with wonderfully skewed characters, as dangerous as they are perverse, whiplash dialogue that will have you laughing out loud, and more twists than a hangman's noose. Willard's hard-boiled, hilarious and harrowing page turner deserves a standing ovation.'
- William Diehl

'hard-boiled, fast and funny'
- Michael Garry Smout, Barcelona Review [read the full review]

Down on Ponce by Fred Willard

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Down on Ponce

by Fred Willard