Headfirst off the Caprock

It's the fall of 1974. Kerry Hendrix is eighteen, and all he wants is out of here. Out of high school, away from the decaying West Texas town of Duro, and off this desolate desert plateau called the Caprock. His friends harbor dreams of breaking in to the local music scene, or finding a future in community college, jobs and marriage. Others dive into the blissful but deadly relief of drugs and needles. Kerry wants nothing more than to vanish from this town in a cloud of dust, "like the roadrunner in the cartoon," he says, until a strange and beautiful girl arrives from nowhere to knock him off his feet and send his world tumbling out of control ­— and land him squarely in the no-man's land between a brutal drug dealer and a sadistic lawman. In this first novel by oilpatch business writer Henry D. Terrell, the author reopens and mines his own past growing up in West Texas to spin a rough-edged story of official corruption, betrayal, murder and, most terrifying of all, True Love.