God's Pocket

New York: Random House Inc -Vintage Books, 1984. Second Printing . Hard Back. Very Good/Good. 5 3/4" x 8 1/2. 274 Pages. Black boards with blue quarter-spine and silver spine lettring. Very slight barely noticeable spine cock. A bump on the top of the back board and very light fading to top and bottom of boards. Interior of white pages is faultless and has the feel of a book never opened. Dust jacket price $14.95 is unclipped and has some edge wear and a half inch tear at top of front. Leon Hubbard was a child only a mother could love. He tested everyone he met with dark stories about the things he had cut with his straight razor. You never could be completely sure when he was lying. He talked to himself, saw his enemies everywhere. Even standing still, Leon made other men nervous. Men like his stepfather, Mickey Scarpato, and his construction boss, Coleman Peets. And Old Lucy; a sixty-nine-year-old bricklayer he worked with. Then it went too far. Leon put his razor under Lucy's chin during lunch one day; and the old man picked up a pipe and killed him. And everyone called it an accident. The police, in the person of Calamity Eisenhower, knew something had happened, but as Eisenhower looked around at the construction workers, it came to him to leave it alone. Mickey Scarpato and most everyone else who knew what Leon was like were willing to leave it alone, too. Everybody except Leon's mother, Jeanie. But with Leon, the trouble he caused wouldn't die, even when he did. Mickey lost the funeral money on a horse and found himself carrying Leon's body around in the back of his refrigerator truck until he could figure out something to do with it. It all might have healed itself if local newspaper columnist Richard Shellburn, fading voice of the common man, hadn't decided to resurrect his career by honoring a dead construction worker. Certain writers seem born with an eye for time and place, and an ear for the way ordinary people speak. Pete Dexter is one of them. He is also a storyteller. In this striking debut, he brings to life a whole community of characters as he tells a compulsive story of a murder and its consequences.