Kirjahaku

Wanting desperately to be behind the wheel, Luke Fulmer counts down the days to his sixteenth birthday, when he can finally get his license. Unfortunately, the first thing he does with it is "borrow" his neighbor's car. When he is pulled over and found in possession of an air pistol, a ski mask, a stolen TV, and a bag of pot, the unforgiving local magistrate takes scissors to his license and vows to lock him up if he ever stands in front of her again. So with an absent father and a mother descending into alcoholism, he moves in with his older brother, Nick, an easygoing ex-con who wants to steer Luke onto the straight and narrow. In the summer that follows, Luke contends with a kleptomaniac girlfriend, a duffel bag full of cocaine, and the realization that he must save his family from themselves, even as he plots to beat a path out of town. In his hilarious, unforgettable debut -- with everything from stock car racing to drug dealing -- Dallas Hudgens brilliantly evokes Southern culture in a tale that is raucous and wrenching, funny and wise.

When his shady business partner, Gene, dies rounding the bases during a baseball game during their Friday-night league, Joe's simple life is met with a hectic, threatening series of events that force him to confront the ghosts of his past and make life-altering decisions about the present in this moving story from the author of the bestselling novel Drive Like Hell. Somewhere between incarceration and sainthood is Joe Rice, a man who relishes peace, painkillers, and his Friday-night baseball league. But when his business partner drops dead in the middle of a game, he is confronted by a suburban ex-mobster, his entrepreneurial son, and a gun-toting minister searching for a three-million-dollar Babe Ruth baseball bat that Joe knows nothing about. Trying to save his business from his dead partner's mountain of debt, crime, and craziness, Joe is forced to face the ghosts of his pasts as his murdered uncle and mentally unstable mother interfere with his attempts to move forward. While dealing with the pain of the past, Joe is faced with navigating the space between the two women he cares about and what the future will look like for all of them. This raucous and moving story of love and baseball is a wild ride of a novel about a troubled man, the troubled women who love him, and a legendary baseball bat that could either save their lives or get them killed.