False River

Book excerpt: False River is the story of a black sheep son of an aristocratic Southern family gone to seed. Growing up, Cam Daltry made a name for himself in his hometown by stirring up trouble. But the smirks he'd always been given for his boyhood sins turn to genuine shame when he goes AWOL from the Marines, gets thrown in the brig, and then gets shipped back home to Louisiana with a dishonorable discharge. So he enrolls in college, lands a blueblood girlfriend, and sets out to give the good old Southern straight and narrow an honest try. It isn't long before he finds trouble again, and this time it's worse than ever. The law comes after him, his parents write him off, and he sets out on a desperate odyssey to get help from his estranged older brother Andrew--an ambitious law student at Tulane. But after being drawn into the seedy underbelly of the French Quarter, Cam falls in with a wild slew of characters in a downward spiral that shows him the dark truth of himself and pushes him ever closer towards a final and irreversible attempt at redemption. He goes to daring but ever more pitiful extremes to escape his troubles, but they quickly reach such shocking depths that even Andrew is swallowed up by them. It's only in the painful wake of accidental tragedy that Cam sees how to follow his older brother's lead, and becomes determined to make a man out of himself with what will be the truest but also the hardest acts of his life.