Pale Horse Coming by Stephen Hunter

Pale Horse Coming by Stephen Hunter

It's 1951. The Thebes State Penal Farm in Mississippi is up a dark river, surrounded by swamps and impenetrable piney woods. It's the Old South at its most brutal--a place of violence, racial terror, and even more horrific rumors. Of the few who make the journey, black or white, even fewer return.

But in that year, two men will come to Thebes. The first is Sam Vincent, the former prosecuting attorney of Polk County, Arkansas who, with great misgivings, accepts a job to investigate a disappearance. Before he leaves on this dangerous trip, he confesses his fears to his former investigator Earl Swagger, now a sergeant of the Arkansas State Police. Earl pledges that if Sam is not back by a certain time, he will come looking for him.

What they encounter there is something beyond their wildest imagining of evil. The dying black town is ruled by white deputies on horseback who are more like an occupying army and the only escape is over the wild currents of the dark river that drowns as many people as it liberates. But nothing in town compares to the prison. Run by an aging madman with insane theories of racial purity, it is administered by a brutal sergeant known as Bigboy. The convicts call him The Whip Man--he can take a man's soul with his nine feet of braided catgut.

Both Sam and Earl will be challenged to the limits of their strength by this place and will struggle not only for their own survival, but with the question: What does a man do when confronted with evil?

Evan Hunter (1926-2005) was one of the best-loved mystery novelists of the twentieth century. Born Salvatore Lambino in New York City, he served in the US Navy during World War II and briefly worked as a teacher after graduating from Hunter College. The experience provided the inspiration for his debut novel, The Blackboard Jungle (1954), which was published under his new legal name and adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier. Cop Hater (1956), the first entry in the 87th Precinct series, was written under the pen name Ed McBain. The long-running series, which followed an ensemble cast of police officers in the fictional city of Isola, is widely credited with inventing the police procedural genre. As a screenwriter, Hunter adapted a Daphne du Maurier short story into the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and turned his own bestselling novel, Strangers When We Meet (1958), into the script for a film starring Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak. His other novels include the New York Times bestseller Mothers and Daughters (1961), Buddwing (1964), Last Summer (1968), and Come Winter (1973). Among his many honors, Hunter was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America and was the first American to receive the Cartier Diamond Dagger award from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781416593645
ISBN 10	1416593640
Title	Pale Horse Coming
Author	Stephen Hunter
Series	Earl Swagger
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Year published	2008-08-26
Number of pages	678
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable