Jim Thompson: The Transgressors

From the Publisher:
On the day he accidentally killed Aaron McBride, Tom Lord went from being a sheriff's deputy to a man awaiting execution. Because if the law didn't punish him, his victim's widow - or his shadowy business associates - surely would.

The Transgressors is a novel of hair-trigger tension and mind-boggling reversals, a one-way trip into the desolate territory that Jim Thompson mapped and staked out as his own and populated with tarnished cops, conniving hustlers, and ingeniously sadistic thugs.

Jim Thompson: The Transgressors. Vintage, ISBN: 0679740163 (February, 1994), 248 p., $13.00