Part of Series
Jack Keller is back in the desert, trying to make a new life for himself and trying to heal from the wounds, both physical and emotional, he suffered from the events of Devils and Dust. But trouble has a way of finding Jack. When he rescues a stranger from being beaten and robbed in a parking lot, the man claims to be carrying a message from the father who abandoned him years ago—a man who claims to have the secret behind the trauma Keller suffered in the first Gulf War. Jack’s dying father, however, has his own secret agenda, and the beautiful and ruthless heiress to a powerful political dynasty is willing to go to bloody extremes to keep the past buried. When she turns to an amoral ex-government agent to silence him “by any means necessary”, Jack Keller, former hunter of men, finds himself being hunted once again. But this time, he’s all alone, with nothing and no one to hold back the dark tide of rage he’s been fighting for years. When Jack Keller’s demons are finally unleashed, there’s going to be Hell to pay—and no one will be safe.
Author
J.D. Rhoades is America's foremost writer of the genre known as "Redneck noir," and his biography reads like "Tobacco Road" as written by Hunter S. Thompson. Rhoades never knew his parents; he was found abandoned on the steps of a cut-rate Filipino tax preparation service in Slidell, La. As a child, he was bounced around between a series of orphanages, reformatories and opium dens. His first brush with the law came when he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. He was seven years old at the time. Rhoades first turned to drugs at the age of five, when he discovered you could get high by snorting Nestle’s Quik through a rolled up copy of Highlights magazine. Since then, he claims to have ingested marijuana, peyote, heroin, psilocybin, uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, dried banana peels, glue, paste, mucilage, LSD, DMT, STP, ABC, CNN, TLC, Sterno, Drano, Bondo, Ketamine, Dopamine, glucosamine, Ovaltine, and Krispy Kreme. He hit rock bottom when he did all of them in the same night and woke up two weeks later, hanging upside down by his knees from a tree limb in Duluth, Minn., and singing an aria from “Die Fledermaus.” In German, a language that he does not speak. Rhoades is rumored to have once killed a stripper with a fondue fork and disposed of the body using an electric pencil sharpener over a period of 14 hours. Ii is not known whether the rumors are true that Rhoades kidnapped the Lindbergh Baby, nor can reports that he was the shooter on the grassy knoll when Kennedy was shot be confirmed. He does, however, know Tom DeLay personally. -Biography contributed by James Frey
