Billy Roper and his uncle think robbing a truck full of gold is their big chance. But if the cops and the mafia don’t catch them first, The Devil Is Waiting.
LATE ONE SNOWY NIGHT in 1985, a young ex-con and his uncle hijack a truck carrying a fortune in gold coins on Chicago’s Lower Wacker Drive. Billy Roper is haunted by his past, but he hopes for a second chance at life. His Uncle Berg, a small-time career criminal, is desperate for one last score.
The consequences of the hijacking will echo for generations. Decades later, after Billy is released from prison for the second time, his nephew Gary, a college student, pressures him to return to crime—just as Berg had done in ’85. In flashback, we see Billy’s grandfather Jacob fighting with the U.S. Marines on the South Pacific island of Guadalcanal during World War II, and the event that injects an inescapable fate into the family’s male bloodline.
The long-awaited follow-up to his acclaimed 2014 novel Shadows the Sizes of Cities, Gregory W. Beaubien’s The Devil Is Waiting thrills with its tight plot, lean prose and vivid imagery. This complex drama of human desperation will keep readers turning pages, and wondering about the role that fate plays in all of our lives.
Fiction/Literature. Trade Paperback, $15.99 (ISBN 978-0-9911816-4-3), eBook $3.99 (ISBN 978-0-9911816-1-2)
