Southern Noir

Someone is about to make a killing in the music industry. Why would songwriting legend Gideon Pike disappear just as his 30-year career turns a multimillion-dollar profit Music columnist Mick Sever goes looking for his missing friend Gideon in the gritty backrooms of Miami's nightclubs, dodging suicide speedboats and running from sniper fire. What surfaces is how the major players in the music industry are not making the headlines, but just pulling the strings that create them.

In Denton, Arkansas, the fate of the high school football team rests on the shoulders of Billy Lowe, a volatile but talented running back. Billy comes from an extremely troubled home: a trailer park where he is terrorized by his unstable mother's abusive boyfriend. Then Billy's abuser is found murdered in the Lowe family trailer, and all evidence points toward Billy. Now nothing can stop an explosive chain of violence that could tear the whole town apart on the eve of the playoffs.

Having left Texarkana for the safety of the West Coast, reporter Charlie Yates finds himself drawn back to the South, to Hot Springs, Arkansas, as an old acquaintance asks for his help investigating the mysterious deaths of three women. On arrival, he discovers that his contact has perished in a hotel fire and that nobody in the place seems to know anything about the murders. Can Charlie to do the right thing before it's too late?