Blue Hotel

It’s the bitter winter of 1948. The young driver for a Chicago gangster flees his boss’s retribution carrying a valise full of stolen mob money. Suffering from an infected bullet wound received during his escape, he leaves his California-bound train and takes refuge in a dying Nebraska railroad town where he encounters a corrupt sheriff and a crippled war veteran who has been traumatized both by his combat experience and a tragic event back home that took place while he was fighting in Europe.

This is a novel imagined as a sequel to Stephen Crane’s 1899 short story called “The Blue Hotel”.