Holdout

Toby Austin used to be a cop. Now he works out of the third booth of an Austin honky-tonk, with a ruined face, a bad heart, and a pedal steel guitar he plays when the words won’t come.

When a grandmother sets a folded police report on his table, the case looks hopeless and the pay is worse: her grandson, a careful young bartender who didn’t drink and feared the water, has been written off as a drunken drowning. But Toby knew the man who signed the case shut — and once he starts pulling the thread, it climbs. Up through laundered money and bought cops and gleaming glass towers, all the way to the single most beloved man in the city, a man the whole town would sooner die than suspect.

Toby has one fragile piece of proof, no badge, and no clean way to use it. And the machine he’s up against has never once lost.

A slow-burning, deeply Texan crime novel for readers of James Lee Burke, S.A. Cosby, and Attica Locke — about money, murder, and who gets to count as a person.