The Sweet and the Dead
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Distilled in Texas and the Delta, a straight-no-chaser crime novel set around the legendary Dixie Mafia
Manfred Eugene "Hog" Webern, a retired Dallas County deputy sheriff, is talked into going undercover in Biloxi, Mississippi, in a multistate effort to nail a group of traveling Southern criminals who have been tagged by the press with the lurid name "Dixie Mafia." After making contact with the gang's nominal leader, the notorious Jasper Sparks, Webern begins to worm his way into the group's confidence. He also meets and becomes involved with an old friend of Sparks, the mysterious Nell Bigelow, a former assistant federal prosecutor whose daddy "owns half the Delta."
Having gained the gang's trust, Webern soon learns that the score being planned is the massive robbery of a wintering carnival of an entire year's receipts. Joining in planning the job, he meets such well-known hijackers as Slops Moline, a Charleston, South Carolina, killer and armed robber; Lardass Collins, the country's premier car thief; Tom-Tom Reed, one of the world's most skilled safecrackers; and the infamous Raymond "Hardhead" Weller, an Alabama-born moonshiner who has pulled off more than two dozen high-profile contract killings in his seventy years.
As the story develops, Webern is drawn into a maelstrom of robbery, mayhem, and senseless violence that threatens to engulf his very being. And before the final curtain falls on The Sweet and the Dead, we learn that in the murky world of Southern professional crime, nothing is ever quite what it seems to be.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Imagine the classic heist movie The Asphalt Jungle moved to 1970 Biloxi, Miss., and you get the feel for Burton's steamy, low-down second novel (after The Rogues' Game). Former Dallas deputy sheriff Manfred Eugene "Tush Hog" Webern goes undercover to help fellow lawmen break up a loose gang of Southern thugs dubbed the Dixie Mafia. Webern retired under a cloud, so he knows he'll be accepted by the gangsters, headed by psychopath Jasper Sparks and made up of a collection of Runyonesque characters, including hit man Raymond "Hardhead" Weller and former heavyweight contender "Slops" Moline, each with a specific criminal talent. Burton skillfully describes Webern's cool, companionable socializing with crooks and murderers at the notorious Sam Lodke's Gold Dust Lounge as the lawman ingratiates himself with Sparks. Most of the novel involves the detailed planning of a heist assembling a reliable gang, acquiring equipment and Webern's affair with former federal prosecutor Nell Bigelow, daughter of a Delta millionaire. Atmospheric vignettes slow the pace, but the book picks up speed after Webern finally identifies the shadowy forces that double-cross the gang and set him up.