Last Call for the Living

Those who savor violent action will welcome Farris’s debut, a bleak crime thriller. Shortly after Hobe Hicklin, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, gets out of prison, he robs a branch of the North Georgia Savings and Loan, where he kills one clerk and kidnaps another, Charlie Colquitt, before heading for a remote mountain hideaway. Hicklin’s big mistake is “jumping the score”—robbing the bank without his vicious ex-con partner, Leonard Lipscomb, and messing up a plan hatched by a prison network. With Lipscomb after him as well as special agent Sallie Crews of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and alcoholic sheriff Tommy Lang, Hicklin and his hostage hole up with Hicklin’s drug-addled woman called Hummingbird. Farris’s nothing-to-lose bad guys have little appeal, and the critical relationship between Hicklin and Colquitt, who forge a strange bond, will disappoint readers looking for emotional resolution. Agent: Susan Gleason, Susan Gleason Literary Agency. (May)