Dodgers

"Gone five, six days. You got a dog or a snake or something, find someone to feed it." That's about all East, a skinny sixteen-year-old drug-house lookout who's never left LA, is told about his assignment before he's thrown in a van with three other boys and told to drive east to kill a man. Beverly's debut hits many of the notes you might expect from the best crime fiction (Richard Price's in particular), but with its emphasis on character over action and a story whose surprising turns recall classic American fugitives like Huck Finn and Frederick Douglass, it takes you to places you, like East, never expected to end up.