Charles Willeford

Richard Hudson, woman chaser and used car salesman, has a pimp's awareness of the ways women (and men) are most vulnerable. One day Richard decides to make an ambitious film, which turns into a fiasco. Enraged, he exacts revenge on all who have crossed him.

The sport is cockfighting, and Frank Mansfield is the Cockfighter--a silent and fiercely contrary man whose obsession with winning will cost him almost everything. In this haunting, ribald, and percussively violent work, the author of the Hoke Mosely detective novels yields a floodlit vision of the cockpits and criminal underbelly of the rural South.

Fast-talking, backstabbing, womanizing art critic Jacques Figueras will do anything - blackmail, burglary, fencing, assassination - to further his career. Crossing the art world with the underworld, Willeford expands his noir palette to include hues of sunny Florida and weird tints of Surrealism when Figueras takes a job for an art collector who doesn't care how his art is collected, even if ...