Dodgers

Winner of the British Book Award for Best Crime and Thriller Novel 2017
Winner of the CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger 2016
Winner of the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger 2016
Winner of the LA Times Book Prize 2017
Shortlisted for the British Book Award for Overall Book of the Year 2017
Shortlisted for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel 2017
Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction 2017
Shortlisted for the Barry Award for Best First Novel 2017

When East, a low-level lookout for a Los Angeles drug organisation, loses his watch house in a police raid, his boss recruits him for a very different job: a road trip - straight down the middle of white, rural America - to assassinate a judge in Wisconsin.

Having no choice, East and a crew of untested boys - including his trigger-happy younger brother, Ty - leave the only home they've ever known in a nondescript blue van, with a roll of cash, a map and a gun they shouldn't have.

Along the way, the country surprises East. The blood on his hands isn't the blood he expects. And he reaches places where only he can decide which way to go - or which person to become.

By way of The Wire and in the spirit of Scott Smith's A Simple Plan and Richard Price's Clockers, Dodgers is itself something entirely original: a gripping literary crime novel with a compact cast whose intimate story opens up to become a reflection on the nature of belonging and reinvention.

"The book is a mashup of rite of passage and road trip, with the four main characters at odds not only with each other, but also with a country that is entirely alien to them. The quiet, watchful East, at once world-weary and naive, is a heartbreakingly believable character." --The Guardian

"Not only is the fast-paced and masterfully plotted Dodgers one of the greatest literary crime novels you will read in your lifetime, Bill Beverly has also created, in the teenage boy, East, one of the most unforgettable and heartbreaking characters ever encountered in American fiction"--Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff and The Devil All the Time

"An excellent book . . . Imagine the young corner boys from The Wire on a road trip across the USA"--James Brown, Sabotage Times

"Dark, edgy and riveting and, for all that, deeply, humanly serious, Dodgers is white knuckles for the mind"--Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

"This intense, dangerous debut is tipped for major awards"--Sunday Express

"An important literary crime novel written in street prose which you can expect to be vying for awards soon"--Crime Scene Magazine

"Akin to William Gibson in its staccato blizzard of sentences, each as taut and tight as a drumhead, and reminiscent of James Ellroy in its sense of social injustice and of a life and upbringing etched caustically across the pages. A compelling debut"--Luke McCallin, author of The Man from Berlin and The Pale House

"Dodgers is a wickedly good amalgamation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Clockers that stands firmly on its own as a remarkable debut. A harrowing road trip into the heart of America that will shock you, move you, and leave you marvelling at its desolate poetry"--Richard Lange, author of Angel Baby and The Wicked World

"Dodgers is a dark, unforgettable coming-of-age journey that recalls the very best of Richard Price, Denis Johnson, and J.D. Salinger"--Bookateria

"Beverly makes his fiction debut with a dazzling crime novel that's equal parts coming-of-age tale à la Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and travelogue a la Kerouac"
--Publishers Weekly

"Provocative, gripping, and timely, Dodgers is a riveting read that leaves a lasting impression"--American Bookseller's Association

"A terrific novel, urgent, thrilling, and dangerous from start to finish. In East, Mr. Beverly has created a character who stays in the mind after the book is finished, an Odysseus straight out of Compton. His venture into the unknown lands of the American Midwest has a classic, mythic shape and scope. And the writing throughout is lovely, economical and exact. You could read this for the sentences alone"--Kevin Canty, author of Into The Great Wide Open
"Dodgers transcends genres. Its main character East, is part Kerouac's Sal Paradise, part Wright's Bigger Thomas, and even part Salinger's Holden Caulfield. The hero's journey is an American story" --Ernesto Quinonez, author of Bodega Dreams

"The prose is tight, the dialogue rhythmic, the pacing fast, the violence measured, and the ending unexpected." --The Financial Times

"The dialogue is not just the usual low-life slang between minor criminals; it exposes the real fears and deep sadness of teenagers who grow up in a world of poverty, drugs and violence." --The Times

"This is an excellent tale. Beverly places the reader within an alien subculture but his picture is entirely convincing" -- Crime Review

"Beverly's writing turns the most banal setting into a thing of beauty." -- Metro

"This sweeping coming-of-age story will take you to whole new heights." --Bustle

"The writer certainly deserves the acclaim, with his unique narrative voice." --Crime Time

"The tension stays high and reflective moments serve only to give the characters - and the reader - a breather before the next, more exciting set piece, of which there are many. Great ending too." - Esquire

"Although Beverly evokes the great outdoors with photographic clarity, claustrophobia effectively haunts his narrative...With his focus on people and personalities, the author could justifiably bypass the bigger picture, the heartland rusting to death in the background. But, admirably, he doesn't" - The New York Times

"Vastly impressive...draws lyric prose out of the unlikeliest of materials" - The Wall Street Journal

"Intimate and intense, Dodgers is a gripping coming of age tale that evokes Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. It's Bill Beverly's debut novel - his previous nonfiction book delved into the stories of criminal fugitives - and his potent, direct prose will lure you in from the first page" -- Los Angeles Magazine

"This is an exceptional novel, written with a spare and precise authority that summons up the ghosts of Mark Twain and Herman Melville in its treatment of East's unrealised potential as a worthy member of a decent society. I read it twice, and a second reading increased my admiration for Bill Beverly's achievement. Dodgers is very funny, very - but justifiably - nasty, and unexpectedly moving." --Literary Review

"A road movie, a coming-of-age tale, a crime novel of gritty realism and a hugely impressive debut." --Irish Times

"Beverly's wonderful debut is striking not for his violence but for finding tenderness and grace in such a situation." --Catholic Herald

"A road-trip crime story that is so so much more. Beverly's tale of a bunch of LA hoodlums on a mission deserves to be the next great American classic." --The Bookbag

"Beverly is sharp-eyed, ever observant of the weird angle, the hidden glint that charges the prose into life. His language is uniquely his own." --The Spectator

"Dodgers is a terrific debut, Bill Beverly making the reader care about a protagonist who does bad things." --Big Issue

"Beverly follows the great tradition of American crime fiction in paring his prose to the bone so that not a word is wasted and his foul-mouthed, funny dialogue rings true." --Daily Express

"A must read for lovers of crime fiction." --RTE

"Our hands-down favorite mystery title of the year is Beverly's debut... Blending a crime story with a coming-of-age tale and a road novel, this literary mystery should be a contender for multiple 'best' lists." --BookPage

"The main protagonist's voice is both touching and engrossing, a modern version of Holden Caulfield had he been born in Compton and a generation or so later, and his itinerary both geographical and mental is a poetic as well as profane, delicate joy to behold. A character study of the highest quality as well as a thriller as addictive as crack. Without the shadow of a doubt, a book that will come to be seen as a landmark in US crime writing." --Maxim Jakubowski, Love Reading