Treasure Coast is the wild new thriller from Tom Kakonis, the acclaimed author of Criss Cross and Michigan Roll. A compulsive gambler goes to his sister's funeral on Florida's Treasure Coast and gets saddled with her loser-son, who is deep in debt to a vicious loan shark who sends a pair of sociopathic thugs to collect on the loan. But things go horribly awry...and soon the gambler finds himself in the center of an outrageous kidnapping plot involving a conman selling mail-order tombstones, a psychic who channels the dead and the erotically super-charged wife of a wealthy businessman. As if that wasn't bad enough, a killer hurricane is looming... It's "Get Shorty" meets "No Country for Old Men" on a sunny Florida coast teeming with conmen and killers, the vapid and the vain, and where violent death is just a heartbeat away. "Kakonis is a sharp new gambler in the literary crap game -- he just takes the pot." The New York Times "Aptly compared to Elmore Leonard, Kakonis builds exquisite tension...steamy with a high-rent, low-life atmosphere...and an unforgettable cast." Publishers Weekly "Tom Kakonis is a master of the low-life novel. Nobody does it better." Ross Thomas Master of Crime Fiction Tom Kakonis has been hailed by critics nationwide as the heir-apparent to Elmore Leonard... and for good reason. His stunning thrillers blend dark humor with gritty storytelling for compelling, and innovative crime noir capers packed with unique, sharply drawn characters and shocking twists. All of those talents are on full display in Treasure Coast, his bold new thriller from Brash Books. But that success is built on a foundation of incredible crime writing. In his highly-praised debut Michigan Roll, Kakonis introduced Tim Waverly a loveable gambler who constantly finds himself playing a game of survival against the odds. The Waverly series continued with Double Down and Shadow Counter, and Kakonis also penned the hilarious and harrowing Christmas car heist Criss Cross. Kakonis took a darker turn with Blind Spot and Flawless, two mind-blowing thrillers he initially wrote under the pseudonym Adam Barrow. Blind Spot is a tour-de-force that tracks a father s relentless, driving obsession to save his family at any cost, while Flawless, picked as a People Magazine Chiller of the Week, centers on a chilling serial killer as his perfectly-ordered life begins to crumbled when he falls in love, his imprisoned father is released, and a relentless, and sleazy, PI starts to follow the trail of bodies to his door. And now Tom Kakonis is back with the thriller his fans have been waiting to read for years. It was worth the wait. Treasure Coast Is Get Shorty meets No Country for Old Men on a sunny Florida coast that s teeming with conmen and killers and marks the return of Tom Kakonis at his best. Treasure Coast By Tom Kakonis Brash Books, LLC Copyright © 2014 Tom Kakonis All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-941298-01-5 CHAPTER 1 Like most men closing in on the benchmark forty, Jim Merriman made far more promises — to others mainly, a dwindling few yet to himself — than he knew, heart of hearts, he ever intended to keep. It was a habit by now so deeply entrenched, so much a part of him, that he wore it like a second skin: Generate an earnest pledge today; effortlessly shuck it off tomorrow. Mostly it was harmless, this habitual shortfall between oath and execution, deed and good intention. A commonplace human failing, to his thinking, small and forgivable. A way of getting by in this sorry world. But the vow exacted from him by a dying sister — that now was giving him serious pause. Better make that acute discomfort. (If he were going to be honest with himself, for a switch, figuring — trying to figure — how to squirrel out of this one. Very unsettling.) From across the continent, he'd been summoned to her bed of pain, where eventually, floating up out of a narcotized fog, she found the strength to peel back crusted eyelids, fix him with a fluttery gaze, and in a voice fainter than a whisper, feebler than a gasp, murmur, "Jim? That you?" "None other," he affirmed, putting some of that fraudulent deathwatch heartiness into it. "You came." "Said I would." "Been here long?" "Not long," he lied. In fact he'd been sitting there for the better part of the afternoon, studying her sleep, marveling at the relentless progress of this formidable malady, its curious manifestations. Her face, in sleep, was sunken, sallow with a greenish tint, the color of mold-infested cheese. The sockets of the eyes, hollow and dark, looked to be rimmed with a dusting of soot. A limp hand, its flesh withered and veined as a dry leaf, seemed to sprout from a forearm grotesquely swollen to Popeye proportions and out of which coiled an IV vine that leaked some colorless, powerless anodyne into her blood. Now that hand moved in an effort at a sweeping gesture. "No, here, I mean. Florida." "I got in this morning. Leon picked me up at the airport."
