In the vein of Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone and the works of Ron Rash, a novel set in a rough-and-tumble Mississippi town where drugs, whiskey, guns, and the desire for revenge violently intersect

For eleven years the clock had been ticking for Russell Gaines as he sat in Parchman Penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta. His time now up, and believing his debt paid, he returns home only to discover that revenge lives and breathes all around.

On the day of his release, a woman named Maben and her young daughter trudge along the side of the interstate under the punishing summer sun. Desperate and exhausted, the pair spend their last dollar on a motel room for the night, a night that ends with Maben running through the darkness holding a pistol, and a dead deputy sprawled across the road in the glow of his own headlights.

With dawn, destinies collide, and Gaines is forced to decide whose life he will save - his own, or those of the woman and child?

"A harsh but beautiful thriller that has you cheering under your breath for its wounded, fallible protagonist throughout" - LoveReading

"Flickers with poetic splendour... Repetitions, the falling cadences of country music, phrases strung together in long passages of sustained beauty: it's rare for desperation to be rendered with such intensity" - Spectator

"a wonderfully evoked and deeply touching work" - The Big Issue

"Michael Farris Smith's prose focuses on small details and has a rhythm that gives it a poetic quality; a comparison with Annie Proulx is not overly enthusiastic" - Crime Review