National Network for Equitable Library Service

By October, 1967, The Summer of Love is history, rock and roll is dark and revolutionary and people in the small East Texas community of Center Springs want only a quiet life. Unluckily, two years earlier, Anthony Agrioli met newlyweds Cody and Norma Faye Parker in a Vegas casino and heard their enthusiastic descriptions of Center Springs as the perfect place to settle down and raise a family. Now handsome hit man Agrioli and a blonde bombshell full of surprises need a place to hide out and, if possible, duck retribution from his Las Vegas crime boss. Thirteen-year-old Top Parker has what his grandmother, Miss Becky, calls a Poisoned Gift. His dreams, though random and disconnected, always seem to come true. This time Top dreams he’s a wagon wheel hub with spokes converging from all directions. To him, the spokes symbolize that something is coming. And it is—Center Springs will soon become a combat zone when a squad of gangsters arrives. Oddly, they’re after something else. Not Agrioli—yet. Add a sheriff crooked as a dog’s hind leg, an unsolved murder in the river bottoms, counterfeit money and a bank robbery to this country-noir Shakespearian comedy, cast it with Wortham’s real and sometimes wacky characters including a constable and a judge, and the outcomes become unpredictable.