Don Barnhart

Crooked Road Straight Don Barnhart

Publisher Marketing: A sudden crack of thunder, the kind that shatters moral resolve, rumbles across the barren Mojave mimicking the robust peal of a disgruntled burrito. Bony Jo Sapp, nosing somewhere in his early forties, stands with a cowboy boot firmly planted on the rusted bumper of his faded powder-blue '85 pickup tinkering with a polished .45. Growing weary and impatient and downright pissed, Sapp cools his heels for an undercover drug buy that he knows, down deep in his own rusted gut is about to go terribly wrong. His experience in wrongness is vast and he still can't dial it right. His estranged son comes to mind. So does his own sullied youth. ?This is a guy who cha-cha'd with the devil but forgot how to lead. ... CROOKED ROAD, STRAIGHT is a raw, gritty, high concept crime thriller with our protagonist the focal point of a future series scoured deep from within the underbelly of Las Vegas, deep enough to discover fossils, even if they turn out to be recent 'hits'. But Detective Sapp has other issues besides the sweet purity of whacking bad guys off the leader board with more than just a nine iron, being the hacker that he is. He fathered a beautiful son. And that's the whole trouble right there; his inherit inability to express love and be the father he needs to be while humanity is seriously falling apart all around him. Sapp lives in constant fear of losing the one thing that matters to him the most, his young son before it's too late...