From one of the finest native authors of the Lone Star State comes a tale of Texas Gothic that is suspenseful, revelatory, and moving in ways you have never before beheld. Welcome to Joe Lansdale country.

Today, the Sabine River runs as before, yet the bottoms have been drained. Long gone are the alligators, and the few birds that take to the air cast tiny shadows over concrete surfaces.

But way back then, during the thick of the Great Depression that squeezed Deep East Texas in its impoverishing grip, a boy could hear the crickets and the frogs in the star-studded Southern night. And in this primordial time a killer stalked the land.
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"East Texas in the early thirties was in the throes of the Depression, but for young Harry Collins and little sister Tom — for Thomasina—it is a time of adventure. The woods are filled with all the excitement and mystery two curious youngsters need, but when Harry and Tom find the mutilated, decomposing body of a young black woman on a creek bank in the area called the Bottoms, profound changes come to the Collins family. As the town constable, Harry and Tom's father, Jacob, tries to do his duty, but he runs flush up against the virulent racism of the times. The local white doctor refuses to do an autopsy, the sheriff from the next town warns Jacob off the case for fear of giving the local blacks a sense of protection under the law, and the Klan bums a cross at the Collins place. Jacob, under the watchful eye of his son, tries to do the right thing but eventually makes an error that leads to the lynching of an innocent black man. His struggle to rectify his error forms the lasting impression he leaves with Harry, who narrates the story from his bed at the nursing home, almost 70 years later.

Lansdale, who has forged a name for himself in genre fiction (Two-Bear Mambo, 1995) and as the author of cult short stories — "Godzilla's 12-Step Program" is a classic — makes the move to morę mainstream fiction with an emotionally charged tale very reminiscent of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Effectively combining mystery and family history, it offers a vivid, multifaceted glimpse back to a simpler, but not necessarily better, time. If any author ever deserved a breakthrough book, it's Lansdale. This should be it." —Wes Lukowsky
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"A folklorls's eye for telling detail and a front-porch raconteur's sense of pace.... No trlcks, no stylish ennui, no somnambuant remoteness or pointless savagery are required, but a rare sort of gift is, and Joe Lansdale has his in bushel baskets." [New York Times Book Revlew]