White Leg - Hardcover

Martinez, Max

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1558850988 ISBN 13: 9781558850989

Publisher: Arte Publico Press, 1996

Synopsis

White Leg, Texas, is becoming a dangerous place. Especially for Gil Blue, a small-time criminal who suddenly has a price on his head. The local police, the FBI and the Texas Rangers want him behind bars. The town boss and his badass hit man, Flaco, want him dead. So does a swarm of out-of-town killers. Set up to take a hard fall, Gil must survive in a town where no one wants him alive.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Gil Blue's fourteen-month career robbing convenience stores in White Leg and surrounding towns in Texas comes to an explosive end in the early hours one spring morning, when a Texas Ranger walks in on a holdup in progress. Gil is forced to shoot. Five shots ring out; four bodies lie dead and Gil is catapulted from small-time hood into big-time criminal. Adding another knot to the noose tightening around his neck, Gil's conniving wife sets him up to take the fall in a kidnapping scheme involving the grandson of the local town boss. The law is after him, and the outlaws are too. Gil must scramble to stay out of the line of fire in a town where everybody wants him dead.

From Publishers Weekly

While his writing style here echoes Jim Thompson's almost to the point of mimicry, Martinez generates enough suspense in his second novel (after Schoolland, 1988) to make it a thoroughly enjoyable walk on the wild side. Gil Blue, 32, is the hard-boiled narrator, a blue-collar worker in tiny White Leg, Tex., who turns to small-time robbery to meet the expensive tastes of his young wife, Hildy, after the local job market heads south. Gil's luck goes from bad to worse when a Texas Ranger walks in on him as he's robbing a convenience store. Determined to stay out of jail, Gil kills the cop, the store clerk and a young Mexican couple. As the FBI flocks to White Leg, the outlaw discovers that his philandering wife is involved in an elaborate scheme to snatch the grandson of the town patriarch and use him for blackmail. Martinez's account of the convenience store robberies is pedestrian, but the scenes that depict the unraveling of the kidnapping are tight and well crafted, full of the sort of vintage plot twists that make Thompson's lurid prose so compelling. Despite its stylistic echoes, this tough tale marks Martinez as a crime writer to watch.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Arte Publico Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1558850988
• ISBN 13: 9781558850989
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 253