But when the body of a white prostitute is discovered, a rabid mob lynches Moses-a black man who has been something of a surrogate father to Jacob-despite Jacob and Harry's heroic efforts to save him.
Because the victims are black and "harlots," no one in the county much cares. News travels slowly in the days before television, but Jacob learns from the black doctor who performs the makeshift autopsy that two other mutilated bodies have been found over the last 18 months. The discovery presents their father, Jacob Crane-a farmer and barber eking out a living as the town constable-with a nightmarish investigation. Lansdale's 80-something protagonist, Harry Crane, looks back to the day in 1933 when he was 13 and, with his nine-year-old sister, Tom (Thomasina), he found the mutilated corpse of a black prostitute bound to a tree with barbed wire near their home along the hardscrabble bottomlands of the Sabine River. In his latest suspense thriller, prolific yarn-spinner Lansdale, best known for his offbeat series featuring the mismatched East Texas Sherlocks Hap Collins and Leonard Pine (Bad Chili), presents a different voice in a coming-of-age story set in the early years of the Great Depression.
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