Part of Series
Longtime lovers and con artists Sam and Rachel sign on to help Sam’s old mentor, a legendary grifter known as Aunt Sally, pull off a scam that leverages the racist sentiments, gimlet-eyed avarice, and sleazy lust of an odious white supremacist college professor. But the couple has dragged their past behind them, and the Philly mobsters they ripped off not so long ago have set a relentless hunter with a head full of demons on their trail, with a mandate to inflict as much pain as possible before he puts the couple in the ground. As they put the grift together, Sam and Rachel uncover secrets and surprises about Aunt Sally, her enigmatic partner William, and themselves. People Like Us is a story of love and loyalty, of the lies that we call history, and of people who fight to live and love outside the walls of normal society.
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
