Vince Majestyk is a simple man with a complicated past. He’s decorated Vietnam veteran but also an ex-con with an ex-wife and a daughter somewhere out there. But for now, he’s just a melon farmer looking to make up for last year’s losses with a bumper crop. Majestyk hires day laborers at fair wages to pick his melons, but one day he shows up to the field to find other men working the job. Majestyk is being squeezed by a local tough-guy who imagines he […]

John “Son” Martin, Jr made one slip-up in the Army. Drunk with a fellow soldier, he bragged about the massive store of illegal whiskey his father had distilled and hidden away on their family property. Years later, Son’s father is long gone and he’s in charge of the land and the whiskey, but his old Army buddy has an idea. Frank Long has become a federal prohibition agent, and he’s come into town threatening to shut down all the bootleggers in the county unless Son […]

Written and set about twenty years after the height of the peace-and-love Sixties, Elmore Leonard’s Freaky Deaky is populated with former protesters and idealists, now beaten down by the realities of the word and looking out for themselves. Robin and Skip were so invested in the movement they would up doing federal time for blowing up a government building. Now Skip works on creating explosions on movie sets and Robin writes romance novels under a pen name, but when they put together who it was […]

Jack Foley is a cool customer. Whether he’s robbing a bank or breaking out of prison, Foley doesn’t let anything get to him. Until he gets a look at U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco. When Sisco shows up at his Florida prison coincidentally just as he’s making his break, Foley and his friend Buddy wind up taking her along for the ride, albeit in the trunk of their car. Foley gets right there in the trunk with her, and the close quarters only make him more […]

Fashion model Kelly Barr is in a tough spot. Under duress, she agreed to help her roommate and fellow model Chloe Robinette “entertain” Chloe’s 84-year-old boyfriend, a wealthy lawyer named Tony Paradiso. It’s pure luck that she’s out of the room when two men break in and shoot both Mr. Paradise and Chloe dead. But that luck doesn’t last long, as Paradiso’s ex-con fixer wants her help getting hold of some valuable items the old man left behind in a safety deposit box in Chloe’s […]