Los Angeles, 1953. Lionel Walk is a young black caddy at Brookline, the oldest, most exclusive country club in the city, where he is known by the nickname Train. A troubled, keenly intelligent kid with no particular interest in his own prodigious talent for the game, he keeps his head down and his mouth shut as he navigates his way between the careless hostility of his totes and the explosive brutality of the other caddies. Miller Packard, a sergeant with the San Diego police department, first appears on the boy s horizon as a distracted gambler, bored with ordinary risks. Train names him the Mile-Away Man as they walk off the first tee, and even months later, when they have become partners of a sort and are winning high-stakes matches against golf hustlers all over the country, the Mile-Away Man is a puzzle to Train, remote and intimate, impulsive and thoughtful, often all at the same time. Packard is also a puzzle to Norah Still, the beautiful lone survivor of a terrifying yacht hijacking, who is both aroused and repulsed by his violent and detached manner at the crime scene. Packard himself feels no such ambiguity. He is unequivocally drawn to Norah and perhaps to what has happened to her and an odd, volatile triangle takes shape, Packard pulling the other two relentlessly into deeper water, away from what is safe. With his trademark economy of style, Dexter brings these characters to life in their most reckless, vulnerable moments, stripping away words and manners until all that is left is the basic human pulse. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

National Book Award winner Dexter's new book is about pain: the men and women who deliver the emotional and physical blows and the limits of those who bend and break beneath them. This is a theme that runs like a dark thread through Dexter's work, from his prize-winning Paris Trout to The Paperboy. In his latest, no one escapes unscathed, and that includes the reader. It's 1953, and Lionel Walk, a black 18-year-old caddy known as Train, works at an exclusive Los Angeles golf course. The members there are cruel and bigoted, the other caddies violent and criminal. Train is badly treated by everyone except enigmatic golfer Miller Packard, who plays a decent game and recognizes that Train has a special talent for the sport. Packard is a police sergeant who comes to the rescue of beautiful Norah Rose when she is viciously attacked and her husband is slaughtered in an attempted boat hijacking. Packard and Norah fall in love, and he moves into her Beverly Hills home. Meanwhile, Train loses his job and eventually finds work as a groundskeeper at the rundown Paradise Developments golf course. He gets the course back into shape, but this hopeful interlude cannot last. A botched tree-removal project ends in tragic farce, and Train is set adrift again. Packard-a rescuer once more-finds Train, turns him into a golf shark and wins thousands on the boy's exceptional talent. In clear, pitch-perfect prose, Dexter moves the relentless story forward, exposing the ironies and dark undercurrents of charitable actions. The calamitous conclusion looms over the novel from the start, and it comes just as the reader knows it must. (Sept. 30) Forecast: Dexter's novels always garner critical praise, and this one will be no exception, though a few reviewers may ask whether the unremitting bleakness of his plots has become formulaic. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Noir straight from the Fifties-and set in Los Angeles, no less. Dexter brings together a black caddy named Train, the police detective whom he calls the "Mile Away Man," and Norah Still, the only survivor of a bloody boat hijacking, whom the detective must keep tabs on-even as he is falling in love. Better catch this train. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Novelist, journalist, and poet Pete Dexter was born in Pontiac, Michigan, in 1943. As a student at the University of South Dakota, where he attended on and off for ten years, he wrote poetry and won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. After graduating in 1970, he found work as a newspaper reporter. While working as a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, Dexter was nearly beaten to death by readers who disapproved of a piece he wrote about a drug-related murder. That experience helped propel him into fiction writing, and in 1984, he published God's Pocket.

Dexter won a National Book Award in 1988 for his novel Paris Trout, a book that exemplifies his characteristic blending of humor and violence. As a journalist, his work has also appeared in such periodicals as Esquire and Playboy.

(Bowker Author Biography) Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.