Excerpt from The Marauders by Tom Cooper, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Wes stood quietly beside his father. From the corner of his eye he could see his sagging shoulders, his lined face. Maybe it was his imagination, but his father's age in the last few years seemed to have come suddenly upon him. He climbed down the ladder slower and slower these days. His body was still wiry but the flesh under his arms was loose and flabby in a way that reminded Wes of a chicken's wattle. And he lumbered stiffly around the boat, clutching his coccyx and wincing.

There was a reason why you saw so many billboards for chiropractors and acupuncturists when you drove into the Barataria. Many guys, their backs were shot before they were even thirty. By forty, they were drinking whiskey every night to keep the pain at bay, scoring Oxycontins from their doctors and friends just to make it through another day of trawling. And by fifty, most of them were over the hill and ruined.

Wes's father was forty-eight.

After a few minutes, Montegut had counted out a hundred and five shrimp.

Wes's father flicked his cigarette onto the ground and heeled it out with his boot. "You mind counting again, Willy?"

Patiently, Montegut took another scoop of shrimp. Weighed. Counted. This time the number was one hundred and ten.

"Fuck," said Wes's father, palming the top of his head like he was polishing a bowling ball.

"How bout we stick with the other number?"

"Appreciate it, Willy."

"Hey, shit."

In the tawny morning light they walked out of the weighing shed and headed down a plank-board path toward Montegut's office. Wes's father's eyes were on the ground and his mouth was cinched. Wes knew that numbers were running wildly through his head. How many days were left in the season, how many hours they would have to spend on the boat for the next several weeks, how much a gallon of diesel cost, how many bills needed paying.

He was sure he'd hear plenty about it later.

They passed a ragtag collection of sheds and warehouses rotting from the salt and sun. A shrimp boat named the Jean Lafitte was moored in one of the slips. A one-armed man in camouflage cargo pants shouted at Montegut's sons as they unloaded the shrimp from his boat. "Look at that," he was saying. "Spillin' them shrimp all over the place. That's two pounds of shrimp right there."

Once they passed out of earshot, Montegut looked over his shoulder. "Son-bitch gets crazier by the year."

Montegut's office was the size of a storage closet, its metal desk littered with papers. Receipts, invoices, bills, time cards. On the wall hung a smoke-yellowed map of the Barataria waterway system. A tide chart, more recent, was tacked up next to it.

Montegut poured coffee from a pot into a Styrofoam cup and then he reached for the bottle of Jameson sitting on top of the filing cabinet. He poured a dollop of booze into the cup and took a swig. Then he slipped off his necklace and took one of the keys that hung from it and opened his desk drawer. From the drawer he took out a large metal box and opened it with another key. He reached inside and withdrew a thick sheaf of one-hundred- dollar bills and licked the ball of his thumb and counted them out. He handed the money to Wes's father, who looked at the bills woefully.

Montegut sat in his office chair and leaned back and tapped his finger, his wedding band thumping against the blotter. "Ask me, it's more the media's fault than anything," he said. "Acting like it's the end of the world. You know how they like to exaggerate. Wanna draw it out so they have a story to scream about every night."

Wes's father pocketed the bills and thanked Montegut. Back at the harbor, he let loose a stream of curses. Wes let out some of his own as he hosed down the deck. His stomach was sour from eating only protein bars and canned ravioli, his tongue charred from his father's burnt chicory coffee. Aside from thirty-minute catnaps in the cabin, he and his father had kept awake the full forty-eight hours straight. This wasn't unusual, not in the beginning of the shrimping season. You heard about crews staying out there for a week at a time. Some of the Vietnamese trawled for two weeks in a row. The spring after Katrina, Wes and his father had stayed out in the Barataria for four days running. But that was when there were two other men on the crew. When Wes's father was younger, stronger.

Excerpted from The Marauders by Tom Cooper. Copyright © 2015 by Tom Cooper. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.