Caught Stealing: A Novel

[A] fantastically hopped-up thriller … a wrong-man plot worthy of Hitchcock. -Entertainment Weekly (Editor’s Choice)

It’s three thousand miles from the green fields of glory, where Henry call me Hank

Thompson once played California baseball, to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where
the tenements are old, the rents are high, and the drunks are dirty. But now Hank
is here, working as a bartender and taking care of a cat named Bud who is surely
going to get him killed.

It begins when Hank’s neighbor, Russ, has to leave town
in a rush and hands over Bud in a carrier. But it isn’t until two Russians in tracksuits
drag Hank over the bar at the joint where he works and beat him to a pulp that he
starts to get the idea: Someone wants something from him. He just doesn’t know what
it is, where it is, or how to make them understand he doesn’t have it.

Within twenty-four
hours Hank is running over rooftops, swinging his old aluminum bat for the sweet
spot of a guy’s head, playing hide and seek with the NYPD, riding the subway with
a dead man at his side, and counting a whole lot of cash on a concrete floor.

All
because of two cowboys, two Russian mafia men, and some of the weirdest goons ever
assembled in one place. All because of Bud. All because once, in another life, in
another world, the only thing Hank wanted was to take third base-without getting
caught.