Firedamp

On a muggy night in the summer of 1930, Deputy Sam Garrett reports for duty to find his mentor and boss, Sheriff I.D. Atkins, shot and left for dead behind the Bell County, Kentucky, courthouse. Unnerved and out of his depth as a greenhorn lawman, Sam is determined to step into the sheriff's shoes but soon finds himself mired in a swamp of deceit.

FIREDAMP (200 pp) is a fast-moving, first-person tale of a young deputy's struggle with ruthless bootleggers and crime bosses. Adding to his troubles are his ne'er-do-well brother, Billy Wade, and his brother's "woman," Jonetta Isbell, an exotic Melungeon vamp from Wasioto.

The story begins with the shooting of the sheriff, then spins off into the investigation of a brutal killing at a coal mine in Kettle Island, where a firedamp (or flash fire) in a deep mine is somehow connected to the murder of a newly arrived miner. As Sam prepares to deal with the two local crimes, he encounters "friendly fire" from Special Agent L.C. Schilder of the federal Bureau of Investigation, and in Newport, Kentucky—the notorious home of vice on the Ohio River during the Prohibition era and America's original "Sin City"—Agent Schilder entangles the deputy in a peculiar scheme to bring down George Rhodes, a Cincinnati gangster known in the Midwest as the "King of the Bootleggers."