Joe Gores: Cases (USA 2001)

From the Publisher:
In 1953 Pierce Duncan leaves college as an innocent and sets off to see America. His road trip will take him from the savagery of a Georgia chain gang to a wild ride through Texas to the darkest side of the Las Vegas fight game, and finally to San Francisco, the far end of the world. Along the backstreets and freight lines Duncan will meet beautiful women, dangerous men, and murder. And he'll learn everything about being a man-and about brutal betrayal. A violence-marked love letter to a lost time in America, CASES is also an ode to the art of writing itself: writing as vivid as lightning over a desert highway, as unforgettable as a first kiss, as haunting as a dead woman's eye.

Joe Gores: Cases. Mysterious Press, ISBN: 0446677930 (August, 2001), 354 p., $6.99 (?).

Joe Gores: Cases (USA 1999)

From the Publisher:
From Joe Gores, the highly acclaimed author of CONTRACT NULL & VOID and three-time Edgar Allen Poe Award-winner, comes a thrilling novel reminiscent of Jack Kerouac's ON THE ROAD - with a taste of murder.

Pierce Duncan, a young man just out of Notre Dame, sets off for the roads and rails of postwar America, driven by Hemingway's belief that "going where you have to go, doing what you have to do, seeing what you have to see" is what makes one a writer. For Pierce, it also leads to strange, fateful meetings: with a redneck guard on a Georgian chain-gang; with a killer on a lonely Texas road; and with a corrupt Los Angeles cult leader. The most influential encounter is with a hard-nosed private eye who changes Pierce's life forever, leading him to San Francisco, where he must decide his ultimate path in the City by the Bay.

Joe Gores: Cases. A Novel. Mysterious Press, ISBN: 0892965932 (January, 1999), 354 p., $19.95 (?).