Part of Series
The Devil's Right Hand is the story of Jack Keller, a man tormented by the nightmares he's had ever since a disastrous tour in Desert Storm. Destroyed by his experience, Keller now makes his living tracking bailjumpers for H&H, a North Carolina bail bonds company run by a reclusive, beautiful, and horribly scarred woman named Angela. In truth, Keller doesn't work bail enforcement to live, he lives to the only thing that breaks through the numbness is the thrill of the hunt, the sound of gunfire, the high that comes with each successful takedown. When H&H is required to track down a lifelong loser for jumping bail on a routine burglary collar, Keller has no idea how gravely events are about to spiral out of his control. He chases his quarry straight into the center of a firestorm involving a pair of local Indians blinded by rage and hell-bent to avenge their father's murder. Along the way they encounter a vicious North Carolina cop with a mean streak and very few moral boundaries. Not to mention the cop's beautiful partner Marie, caught between a newfound desire for the just-on-the-edge-of-the-law Jack Keller and her loyalty to a police department with a serious ethics problem. These people, each hurtling forward on their own individual trajectories of self-destruction, begin to intersect each other's lives in a series of volatile, escalating, and deadly events. Furiously paced and filled with unforgettable, masterfully drawn characters destined to meet in a bloody showdown which most of them will not survive, The Devil's Right Hand is a stylish, razor-edged debut novel that redefines the rules of the Southern thriller.
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
