In 1955, Look magazine called Phenix City, Alabama, "The Wickedest City
in America," but even that may have been an understatement. It was a
stew of organized crime and corruption, run by a machine that dealt with
complaints forcefully and with dispatch. No one dared cross them - no
one even tried. And then the machine killed the wrong man. When
crime-fighting attorney Albert Patterson is gunned down in a Phenix City
alley in the spring of 1954, the entire town seems to pause for just a
moment - and when it starts up again, there is something different about
it. A small group of men meet and decide they have had enough, but what
that means and where it will take them is something they could not have
foreseen. Over the course of the next several months, lives will change,
people die, and unexpected heroes emerge - like "a Randolph Scott
western," one of them remarks, "played out not with horses and
Winchesters, but with Chevys and .38s and switchblades." Peopled by an
extraordinary cast of characters, both real and fictional, Wicked City
is a novel of uncommon intensity, rich with atmosphere, filled with
sensuality and surprise.
