Lucile Garrett is just thirteen when she meets Clint Palmer, a charismatic stranger who will forever change her life. The year is 1934, and as the windblown dust of the Great Depression rakes the Oklahoma plains, Palmer offers Lucile and her father, homeless and hungry, the irresistible promise of a better future. But when they follow Palmer to Texas, Lucile's father mysteriously disappears, launching man and girl on an epic journey through the American Southwest: a spree of violence and murder that culminates in one of the most celebrated criminal trials of the era. Based on a true story, Hard Twisted is a chilling tale of survival and redemption, and a young girl's coming of age in a world as cruel as it is beautiful.

FINALIST FOR THE HARPER LEE PRIZE FOR LEGAL FICTION 2016 FINALIST FOR THE MACAVITY AWARD 2016 The year is 1936. Charles 'Lucky' Luciano is the most powerful gangster in America, Mob overlord and bootlegger millionaire. Thomas E. Dewey is an ambitious young prosecutor determined to bring him down, and Cokey Flo Brown - grifter, heroin addict and sometime prostitute - is the witness who claims she can do it. Only a wily defence attorney named George Morton Levy stands between Lucky and a life behind bars, and between Dewey and the New York Governor's mansion. As the Roaring Twenties give way to the austere reality of the Great Depression, four lives, each on its own incandescent trajectory, intersect in a New York courtroom. The events of this seminal Mob trial will introduce America to the violent and darkly glamorous world of organised crime, and leave its culture, laws and politics for ever changed.