Bottom Liner Blues

BIG TROUBLE IN A SMALL TOWN

With its shut-down mines and restive white-ethnic, blue-collar inhabitants, Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, is in the midst of hard times. And no one has it tougher than its own police chief, Mario Balzic--working hours longer and harder than in his rookie days, suffering the recent death of his mother. Balzic answers a strange call by a woman who warns him that her husband may exact a brutal revenge on a trucker with a shady past. Balzic senses worse trouble ahead than she suggests, and events prove him right.

The case is about to turn into a tour through a peculiarly American brand of hell. Balzic's guide will be a wild, deceptively eccentric Russian novelist named Myushkin, a man who boasts nine books to his credit and exhibits no visible means of support. One small detail: he harbors an alarming facility with a .22 revolver ...