Photographer Clare Porterfield's once-happy marriage is coming apart, unraveling under the strain of a family tragedy. When she receives an invitation to direct an exhibition in her hometown of Galveston, Texas, she jumps at the chance to escape her grief and reconnect with the island she hasn't seen for ten years. There, Clare will have the time and space to search for answers about her troubled past and her family's complicated relationship with...

"Set during the Great Depression, Sarah Bird's Last Dance on the Starlight Pier is a novel about one woman-and a nation-struggling to be reborn from the ashes. July 3. 1932. Shivering and in shock, Evie Grace Devlin watches the Starlite Palace burn into the sea and wonders how she became a person who would cause a man to kill himself. She'd come to Galveston to escape a dark past in vaudeville and become a good person, a nurse. When that dream is...

Nic Pizzolatto, creator of HBO's True Detective, was a fiction finalist for the National Magazine Award and his story collection, Between Here and the Yellow Sea, was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. His story "The Guild of Thieves" was the Honorable Mention for the 2007 Pushcart Prize, and George Pelecanos selected his "Wanted Man" for inclusion in the Best American Mystery Stories 2009. Now Pizzolatto expands his talents...

"There's a killer on the loose in Galveston, targeting law enforcement officials and using a fatal injection of snake venom to take them down. Authorities have reason to believe the Veneno gang is behind the hits, and FBI Agents Leah Riesel and Jon Colbert team up to track down those responsible. Their best lead is an eyewitness who identifies a young man dumping the third body on a church doorstep. But their suspect has gone into hiding, and those...

James Rudolph Youngblood, aka Jimmy the Kid, is an enforcer, a "ghost rider" for the Maceo brothers, Rosario and Sam, rulers of "the Free State of Galveston," who are prospering through illicit pleasures in the midst of the Great Depression. Raised on an isolated West Texas ranch that he was forced to flee at age eighteen following the violent breakup of his foster family, Jimmy has found a home and a profession in Galveston -- and a mentor in Rose...

"Local fighter, future legend, Jack Johnson versus a professional street fighter brought in to put the black upstart in his place. Whorehouses, gambling, racial tension, the intersection between myth, history, legend and reality. The hurricane of the century is coming to destroy it all."--Jacket.

After her sister dies, a North Carolina woman steals her infant son and hides from the brother-in-law in her grandmother's house in Texas. There she has a romance with a man, a childhood friend of both sisters, and learns he is the infant's father.