From “America’s best novelist” (The Denver Post):
A sprawling thriller drenched with atmosphere and intrigue that takes a
young boy from a chance encounter with Bonnie and Clyde to the trenches
of World War II and the oil fields along the Texas-Louisiana coast.
It is 1934 and the Depression is
bearing down when sixteen-year-old Weldon Avery Holland happens upon
infamous criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow after one of their
notorious armed robberies. A confrontation with the outlaws ends as
Weldon puts a bullet through the rear window of Clyde’s stolen
automobile.
Ten years later, Second
Lieutenant Weldon Holland and his sergeant, Hershel Pine, escape certain
death in the Battle of the Bulge and encounter a beautiful young woman
named Rosita Lowenstein hiding in a deserted extermination camp.
Eventually, Weldon and Rosita fall in love and marry and, with Hershel,
return to Texas to seek their fortunes.
There, they enter the domain of
jackals known as the oil business. They meet Roy Wiseheart—a former
Marine aviator haunted with guilt for deserting his squadron leader over
the South Pacific—and Roy’s wife Clara, a vicious anti-Semite who is
determined to make Weldon and Rosita’s life a nightmare. It will be the
frontier justice upheld by Weldon’s grandfather, Texas lawman Hackberry
Holland, and the legendary antics of Bonnie and Clyde that shape
Weldon’s plans for saving his family from the evil forces that lurk in
peacetime America and threaten to destroy them all.