Dodgers: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of April 2016:Dodgers is a thriller that seems to come out of the blue, a unique novel that could be described as equal parts Richard Price and Mark Twain, but in the end is its own thing entirely. The beginning is familiar: an inner city Los Angeles kid named East is working as a low level hired gun assigned to watch a drug den. When things go bad, he is sent out of town with his wilder half-brother and two older gang members to perform a hit. Their target is a man who is hiding out in Wisconsin. What comes next is a novel that is part road trip, part fish-out-of-water, part violent crime thriller, part coming-of-age, and something else altogether. The sense of empathy that the author, Bill Beverly, creates in the reader is as illuminating as it is unexpected. These are characters who we care for, even if we never expected to, and as East finds himself at a personal crossroads, we are right there with him. I tore through this novel and was genuinely disappointed that it had to end. --Chris Schluep