Pale Horse Coming

Zusatztext "If you want thrills! you needn´t seek further." -- Rocky Mountain News (Denver) Informationen zum Autor Stephen Hunter has written over twenty novels. The retired chief film critic for The Washington Post ! where he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism! he has also published two collections of film criticism and a nonfiction work! American Gunfight . He lives in Baltimore! Maryland. Klappentext After an old friend disappears inside Thebes State Penal Farm in 1951 Mississippi! Arkansas State Police Sgt. Earl Swagger infiltrates the prison and discovers a savage world where death is the only salvation. Now in a tall Premium Edition. Reissue. From Part One: Sam´s Journey Chapter 1 In mid-1947, Jefferson Barnes, the prosecuting attorney of Polk County, Arkansas, finally died. Upon that tragedy -- the old man fell out of one of those new golf cart things on vacation in Hot Springs, rolled down a gully screaming damnation and hellfire all the way, and broke his neck on a culvert -- Sam Vincent, his loyal Number 2, moved up to the big job. Then in ´48, Sam was anointed by the Democratic party (there was no other in western Arkansas), which ran him on the same ticket with Harry S. Truman and Fred C. Becker. As did those worthies, he won handily. For Sam, it was the goal toward which he had been aiming for many years. He had always wanted to be a servant of the law, and now, much better, he was the law. Sam was six foot one, forty-four, with a bushy head of hair and a brusque demeanor that would not be called "lovable" for many years. He stared immoderately and did not suffer fools, idiots, Yankees, carpetbaggers, the small of spirit or the breakers of the law gladly. He wore baggy suits flecked with pipe ash, heavy glasses, and walked in a bounding swoop. He hunted in the fall, followed the St. Louis Browns during the summer, when he had time, which he hardly ever did, and tied flies, though he fished rarely enough. Otherwise, he just worked like hell. His was classic American career insanity, putting the professional so far above the personal there almost was no personal, in the process alienating wife and children with his indifference, burning out secretaries with his demands, annoying the sheriff´s detectives with his directions. In what little time remained, he served on the draft board (he had won the Bronze Star during the Battle of the Bulge), traveled five states to interview promising high school seniors who had applied to his beloved Princeton, played a weekly round of golf with the county powers at the country club, and drank too much eight-year-old bourbon. He knew everybody; he was respected by everybody. He was a great man, a great American. He had the highest conviction rate of any county prosecutor in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, or Tennessee for that matter. He was not reelected. In fact, he lost in a landslide to a no´count lawyer named Febus Bookins, a genial hack who smelled of gin all the time and meant only to rob the county blind during his term of office. He called himself a reformer, and his goal was to reform his bank account into something more respectable. Sam had made one mistake, but it was a mistake which few in his home state, and in fact not many elsewhere, could ignore. In 1949, he prosecuted a man named Willis Beaudine for raping a young woman named Nadine Johnson. It was an unremarkable case, save for the fact that Willis was a white person and Nadine a Negro girl. It is true she was quite light, what some would call a "high yeller," and that she had comely ways, and was, perhaps, not normally so innocent as she looked when she appeared in court. But facts were facts, law was law. Certain evidence had been developed by Sam´s former investigator, Earl Swagger, who was now a state police sergeant and was famous for the big medal he had won during the ...

Product details

• Authors: Stephen Hunter
• Publisher: Pocket Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 26.08.2008
• EAN: 9781416593645
• ISBN: 978-1-4165-9364-5
• No. of pages: 678
• Dimensions: 102 mm x 171 mm x 38 mm
• Series: Earl Swagger; Earl Swagger
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature