From the hallucinatory noir novella “Go Deep” to the twisted short stories “Necessary Women” and “Remmy Rothstein Toes the Line”, this collection showcases the New York Times best-selling author’s dark humor, limitless imagination, and masterly command of voice and character.

Go Deep

Growing up dirt poor, Charlie Lam worked his ass off to make something of himself, no thanks to his deadbeat father or his long-suffering mother. And now a lot of people depend on Charlie: by his last count, 68 employees at his Atlanta auto dealership, 11 shiftless brothers and sisters, an ungrateful wife, a spoiled daughter, and a shameless girlfriend. Who could really blame him for wanting a little extra?

The arrangement is simple: Charlie picks up a suit from the dry cleaner’s. In the suit pocket is the name of a very important man. The next day that man walks into the dealership and drives out in a new car, and Charlie gets a fat envelope full of cash.

“Necessary Women”

In a border town between Georgia and Alabama, in a three-room house made of cement block, a 14-year-old girl watches her mother die. Her father is a long-haul trucker, away for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. Her mother, with two menial jobs cleaning restrooms and working nights at the laundry, had been just 30.

A week before she died, noticing her daughter getting attention from a boy, the girl’s mother warned her not to make the same mistakes she had.

“Remmy Rothstein Toes the Line”

As an intrepid adjudicator of world records, Mindy Patel has met lots of strange people in lots of strange places. But they’re no match for the swampers of the Georgia bayou. Mindy has braved the oppressive August heat in search of Remmy Rothstein, who they call the “Cajun Jew.”