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

End of memory.

Next morning Cosgrove woke with a blinding hangover. In a jail cell. Curled fetally on the floor.

Six or seven other miscreants shared the cell, hard-eyed men who looked like they'd been courting trouble since the day they were born. A few paced like caged animals, clutching the bars and howling declarations of innocence. Others sat with their backs against the cinder block wall, eyes shut, heads bowed like penitents.

One bulge-eyed man kept raving about "the famous lawyer Jim Diamond Brousard." "You just call Jim Diamond Brousard," he said. "Tell him that Ricky Hallowell is in trouble."

Another man with a port-wine stain on his cheek had his pants pulled down around his ankles and was shitting without compunction in the corner toilet. He shot Cosgrove a beleaguered look and went about his business.

The police report read like a furloughed sailor's escapades, a story he and his roofing buddies back home would have laughed about. Public intoxication, disorderly conduct, pissing on a jukebox, resisting arrest. He doubted only one part, that he was crying about his father when they shoved him into the back of the police car.

No, that didn't sound like him at all.

* * *

The judge must have hated him on sight because he sentenced Cosgrove to two hundred hours of community service, a punishment insanely disproportionate to the crime. Cosgrove stayed in New Orleans because there wasn't much waiting for him back in Austin save for a crappy roofing job, hell on earth during the summer. Some underwear and socks in an Econo Lodge drawer. His other sole possessions, a cache of childhood mementos and his birth certificate, were still in a safety deposit box in Miami, where he'd left them after a short, ill-fated stint—he'd gotten sun poisoning—as a barback in a South Beach hotel pool-bar.

He feared he was turning into a gypsy, like his father. Maybe in a new place he'd find a career, a woman, a life. He certainly hadn't in Austin. And his fortieth birthday, four months away in January, loomed before him like a storm front. Maybe the best way to weather the sea change was in New Orleans.

Cosgrove rented one side of a sherbet-colored double shotgun in Mid-City and got a job at a neighborhood sports bar shucking oysters. And three days a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays, he showed up at eight in the morning for community service. With a dozen other offenders, deadbeat fathers and druggies and drunks, he waited outside the station in his Day-Glo vest and ragged jeans until a deputy carted them in a windowless white van to their duty for the day. Sometimes they worked in groups of three or four, cleaning graffiti with wire brushes and sandblasters in Jackson Square. Other days they worked en masse, picking up condoms and carnival beads with pointed sticks from the squalid banks of the Mississippi.

A month into his sentence, Cosgrove was dropped off in front of a derelict two-story Victorian with faded purple shutters and lopsided porch columns. It was late August and hot, sparrows keening in the gray-green oaks, bougainvilleas in moribund bloom. A bantam-bodied man with a small pinched face and a black ponytail hanging out the back of his camouflage baseball cap got out of the van with him. They stood on the sidewalk regarding the house.

"Good God Almighty," the ponytailed man said. He had on a tom petty and the heartbreakers T-shirt and frayed denim shorts two or three sizes too large, held up by a canvas belt with a gigantic gold and silver rodeo buckle engraved with the initials jhh.

The deputy, a gourd-shaped Dominican named Lemon, looked at the ponytailed man and then glanced down at his clipboard. "Hanson, is it?" he asked.

"John Henry Hanson," the ponytailed man said. "Yessir." He hung his thumbs from his canvas belt.

"What does it look like, Hanson?"

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.