Hell’s Half-Acre

About the Book

Gray Dunn repossessed cars for a living, which mostly meant turning up where he wasn’t wanted and being harder to move than the people who wanted him gone. That is not a career with a pension at the end of it, and it ended the way those careers do. What came after was a badge, a town, and an ad on a corkboard that nobody local had been desperate enough to answer.

Pleasant Bottom is a dying town built round a hellmouth, and it has been paying the thing underneath for longer than anyone still living wants to explain. It has fallen behind. The Tallyman comes Thursday to settle the account, and Gray is the seventh man to wear the star since the arrangement started going wrong. His deputy dug the graves for the other six, so she has the routine down and is not especially impressed by his odds.

What he has is a badge that talks, a dead man’s shotgun, and three women in town who decide he is worth underwriting. The deputy, who has buried enough sheriffs to have opinions. The woman who runs the diner and carries a scar off the last Tallyman that came through. And a necromancer working out of the strip mall, who has been sitting on the lid of the hellmouth since 1963, back when the town last paid her in casserole and has not improved on the arrangement since.