Jay Desmarteaux raised a whole lot of hell in New Jersey after he was released from prison after 25 years for the murder of a rapist bully at his school. Now he's on the run in his home state of Louisiana, where he traces his roots to an evil family tree that's grown large and lush, watered with the blood of the innocent. Jay's hunt for his parents will take him to the doors of stately plantation homes built by the enslaved, through the deadly and gorgeous heart of the bayou, to his greatest nightmare-a cell in the infamous state prison, where his only escape is the wildest show in the South-the Angola Prison Rodeo.

Scarred and shell-shocked, Jay faces his deadliest adversaries yet: the demons within himself and the brutality wrought by his privileged ancestors. The Boy from County Hell is coming home...

Thomas Pluck has slung hash, worked on the docks, trained in martial arts in Japan, and even swept the Guggenheim museum (but not as part of a clever heist). He hails from Nutley, New Jersey, home to criminal masterminds Martha Stewart and Richard Blake, but has so far evaded capture. His latest is Life During Wartime, a story collection that made Out of the Gutter say "this man can write." He is the author of Bad Boy Boogie, his first Jay Desmarteaux crime thriller, and Blade of Dishonor, an action adventure which MysteryPeople called "the Raiders of the Lost Ark of pulp paperbacks."

Joyce Carol Oates calls him "a lovely kitty man."