Showing Dodgers by Bill Beverly

Winner of the CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger Award 2016

Winner of the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award 2016

‘One of the best literary crime novels you will read in your lifetime’ - Donald Ray Pollock

When East, a low-level lookout for a Los Angeles drug organisation, loses his watch house in a police raid, his boss recruits him for a very different job: a road trip - straight down the middle of white, rural America - to assassinate a judge in Wisconsin.

Having no choice, East and a crew of untested boys - including his trigger-happy younger brother, Ty - leave the only home they’ve ever known in a nondescript blue van, with a roll of cash, a map and a gun they shouldn’t have.

Along the way, the country surprises East. The blood on his hands isn’t the blood he expects. And he reaches places where only he can decide which way to go - or which person to become.

By way of The Wire and in the spirit of Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan and Richard Price’s Clockers, Dodgers is itself something entirely original: a gripping literary crime novel with a compact cast whose intimate story opens up to become a reflection on the nature of belonging and reinvention.

‘Dark, edgy and riveting and, for all that, deeply, humanly serious, Dodgers is white knuckles for the mind’ - Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

‘Imagine the young corner boys from The Wire on a road trip across USA’ - James Brown, Sabotage Times

‘Akin to William Gibson in its staccato blizzard of sentences, each as taut and tight as a drumhead, and reminiscent of James Ellroy in its sense of social injustice and of a life and upbringing etched caustically across the pages. A compelling debut’ - Luke McCallin, author of The Man from Berlin and The Pale House