Book description
Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is a pillar of the community in his small Texas
town, patient and thoughtful. Some people think he's a little slow and
boring but that's the worst they say about him. But then nobody knows
about what Lou calls his 'sickness'. It nearly got him put away when he
was younger, but his adopted brother took the rap for that.
Now the sickness that has been lying dormant for a while is about to
surface again - and the consequences are brutal and devastating... Jim
Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma. After an itinerant childhood
during which his sheriff father was driven from office for embezzlement;
and as a roughneck in the Texan oil fields of the 1920s, Thompson became
successful as a writer with the pulp fiction houses of the 1950s,
writing a dozen of his more enduring novels in just 19 months. He also
wrote two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films THE KILLING and
PATHS OF GLORY).