Pete Dexter

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 “fiancé.” With...

Train is an 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...

Gathering pieces written during the past three decades, Indigo ranges widely in subject matter and tone, opening with "Cleve Dean," which takes Padgett Powell to Sweden for the World Armwrestling Federation Championships, through to its closing title piece, which charts Powell's lifelong fascination with the endangered indigo snake, "a thinking snake," and his obsession with seeing one in the wild. "Some things in between" include an autobiographical...

Leon was a child only a mother could love. He made everyone nervous with his stories about the things he had cut with his razor. But when he cut a 69-year-old bricklayer, the old man picked up a pipe and caved the kid's head in. Everyone, except Leon's mother, called it an accident.

It takes audiences deep into the backwaters of steamy 1960s South Florida, as investigative reporter Ward Jansen and his partner Yardley Acheman chase a sensational, career-making story. With the help of Ward's younger brother Jack and sultry death-row groupie Charlotte Bless, the pair tries to prove violent swamp-dweller Hillary Van Wetter was framed for the murder of a corrupt local sheriff.

Undercover narcotics officers Jim Raynor and Kristen Cates are partners who become lovers and addicts as they infiltrate the local drug scene in order to bring down a suspected drug lord.