Dodgers

Winner of two CWA Daggers awards!

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.

About the Author

Bill Beverly grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He studied at Oberlin College in the '80s and the University of Florida in the '90s. He lives in Hyattsville, Maryland, with his family. His first novel, Dodgers, is forthcoming from Crown in 2016. It is the story of East, a sharp, quiet 15-year-old who guards a drug house in LA. When, one morning, his life suddenly changes, he finds himself thrust into a mission that is out of his depth and the blood he finds on his hands is not the blood he expected. Halfway across an American landscape that is alien to him, he must decide which way to go and which person to become.

His fiction has appeared in The Mississippi Review, Indy Men's Magazine, and is forthcoming in Gargoyle. His Florida dissertation on representations of criminal fugitives in the 1930s and 1940s became his first book, On The Lam. He was an editor of the well-regarded literary magazine 32 POEMS, and coedited an anthology of that work, Old Flame, published in 2013. He teaches by day at Trinity College in Washington, DC.