The Moon in Deep Winter

Book excerpt: When Parker Sloane returns from a foray into third-world cash-smuggling to his childhood home in the woods of New England, it seems he's seeing his country and his blended stepfamily for the first time-- and finding both just as twitchy, desperate, paranoid and unpredictable as the underworld types he thought he'd escaped. Before he can even unpack, Parker goes head-to-head with his relatives--his tyrannical stepfather, seething younger brother, newly evangelical mother, and his alluring younger half-sister Rita--and with the demons they never exorcised. Delicately but disastrously, Parker attempts to keep his family from imploding, unaware that they have their own plans for escape. The Moon in Deep Winter combines the dark comedy of the Coen brothers with the doomed lyricism of Denis Johnson, creating an airtight world of homicidal family dysfunction.