Excerpt from The Painter by Peter Heller, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Sofia pulls up in the Subaru she calls Triceratops. It's that old. I can hear the rusted out muffler up on the county road, caterwauling like a Harley, hear the drop in tone as it turns down the steep gravel driveway. The downshift in the dip and dinosaur roar as it climbs again to the house. Makes every entrance very dramatic, which she is.

She is twenty-eight. An age of drama. She reminds me of a chicken in the way she is top-heavy, looks like she should topple over. I mean her trim body is small enough to support breasts the size of tangerines and she is grapefruit. It is not that she is out of proportion, it's exaggerated proportion which I guess fascinates me. I asked her to model for me five minutes after meeting her. That was about three months ago. We were standing in line in the tiny hippy coffee shop—Blue Moon, what else?—the only place in town with an espresso machine. She was wearing a short knit top and she had strong arms, scarred along the forearms the way someone who has worked outside is scarred, and a slightly crooked nose, somehow Latin. She looked like a fighter, like me. Sofia noticed the paint splattered on my cap, hands, khaki pants.

"Artist," she said. It wasn't a question.

Her brown eyes which were flecked with green roved over my head, clothes, and I realized she was cataloguing the colors in the spatters.

"Exuberant," she said. "Primitive. Outsider—in quotes."

"You're kidding."

"I went to RISD for a year but dropped out."

Then her eyes went to the flies stuck in the cap.

"Artist fisherman," she said. "Cool."

She asked how long I'd been here, I said two weeks, she said, "Welcome. Sofia," and stuck out her hand.

I said I needed models.

She cocked her head and measured me with one eye. Held it way past politeness.

"Nude?"

"Sure."

"How much?"

Shrug. "Twenty bucks an hour?"

"I'm trying to decide if you are a creep. You're not a violent felon are you?"

"Yes. I am."

A smile trembled across her face. "Really?"

I nodded.

"Wow. What'd you do?"

"I shot a man in a bar. You're not going to back out the door like in a horror movie are you?"

She laughed. "I was thinking about it."

"My second wife did that when she found out."

She was laughing uninhibited. People in line were smiling at her.

"You're married?"

"Not anymore. She ran off down the road."

"I'll do it," she said. "For twenty-five. Danger pay."

Took her a while to rein in her mirth.

"Nude modeling for a violent killer convict. That is a first. Twenty-five, right?"

I nodded. "I didn't kill the guy, I just shot him. I was a little high and to the left."

She was laughing again and I knew that I had made a friend.

Now she shoved open the door like she always did, like she was doing some SWAT breach entry. Tumbled into the room.

"Morning."

"Hey."

"Your muffler is getting worse."

"Really? Tops is balking at extinction. Poor guy."

She sat on a stool at the long butcher block counter that separates the kitchen in this one big room. I pushed aside a bunch of sketch paper and charcoal and the fly-tying vise where I'd been tying up some Stegner Killers, invented by yours truly, which the trout couldn't seem to resist the past couple of weeks. I set a mug of coffee on the counter between us, poured myself another.

"What are we doing today?"

"An Ocean of Women. Something I've been thinking about."

"An ocean? Just me?"

"On my way up here from Santa Fe a good friend told me I can't always swim in an ocean of women. I saw it. Me swimming, all the women, the fish. I thought we could give it a try."

"Forget it."

Excerpted from The Painter by Peter Heller. Copyright © 2014 by Peter Heller. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.