Dodgers

The critically-acclaimed award-winning novel. Winner of the LA Times Book Prize 2017 for best mystery/thriller. Winner of the CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel Of The Year. Winner of the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger for Best Debut Crime Novel.

When East, a low-level lookout for a Los Angeles drug organisation, loses his watch house in a police raid, his boss recruits him for a very different job: a road trip - straight down the middle of white, rural America - to assassinate a judge in Wisconsin.

Having no choice, East and a crew of untested boys - including his trigger-happy younger brother, Ty - leave the only home they've ever known in a non-descript blue van, with a roll of cash, a map and a gun they shouldn't have. Along the way, the country surprises East. The blood on his hands isn't the blood he expects. And he reaches places where only he can decide which way to go - or which person to become.

By way of The Wire and in the spirit of Scott Smith's A Simple Plan and Richard Price's Clockers, Dodgers is itself something entirely original: a gripping literary crime novel with a compact cast whose intimate story opens up to become a reflection on the nature of belonging and reinvention.