Dodgers - Bill Beverly

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.