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

Among them Wes's mother.

That was almost exactly five years ago, and the anniversary of his mother's death, August 29, was just half a month away. A day Wes was dreading. Half a decade ago: that meant he'd now lived almost one third of his life without her. He was amazed so much time had passed. Yet the pain was still there, the regrets and resentments between him and his father. There were little things about her he was forgetting, gestures and sayings he struggled to remember. But he recalled her voice distinctly, sometimes even heard it in his dreams. The sweet soothing lilt, a soft halcyon balm on his nerves. Oh, it'll be fine, Wessy. Oh, Wessy, stop being such a worrywart.

What a strange pair Wes's mother and father had been, she the quasi-Bohemian peacekeeper in Birkenstocks, he the hotheaded live wire. Wes often wondered whom he took after most. He preferred to think he was more like his mother in certain respects—the most important, like temperament. But he wasn't sure. As time passed he found himself growing angrier, more doubtful and worried, like his father. But his father's stubbornness and resourcefulness, those were good, and Wes felt those beating in his blood.

Sometimes Wes caught his father glancing at him strangely. He supposed it was because he looked a lot like his mother now that he was full grown. He was slightly short and narrow-shouldered, just like his mother, and his skin browned darkly in the sun instead of reddening to brick like his father's. And Wes had his mother's sharp widow's peak. Her wide-set green eyes, teal in the winter and pale mint in the summer, depending on the darkness of his tan, the color of shirt he wore. Girls in his high school were always telling him what pretty eyes he had. Wes's mother used to say he'd never have a problem with the ladies as long as he stayed a gentleman and kept his eyes in his head.

Recently a memory came back to Wes that he'd long forgotten. One of his friends, Tommy Orillon, offered him a stick of gum at a Fourth of July barbeque and Wes took it, not knowing it was blackberry-flavored. As soon as the taste flooded his mouth, Wes remembered the time his mother took him blackberry picking when he was eight or nine.

The day Wes remembered, a sunny Sunday morning in late June, he and his mother held their own tin pails and they were picking among the thorny bushes beside a still-water creek, making a kind of game out of who could gather the most. Wes picked his blackberries so quickly he ended up nicking his hand in dozens of places with the briars. The lashes began to sting only when the game was over, after they returned home. His mother cupped his hands in hers as he sat crying on the fuzzy cover of the bathroom toilet. "Poor Wessy," she said, gently daubing his fingers with a Mercurochrome-soaked cotton ball. "It's okay, it's okay," she said, stroking her fingers through his hair.

* * *

Tonight Wes's father commandeered the wheel while Wes readied the booms. Under the cloud-shawled moon they yawed through the bayou, passing buoys hung with oil company signs.

DANGER , DO NOT ANCHOR. GAS LINE .
PROPERTY OF BP OIL.
CAUTION: PIPELINE .

Wes fiddled with his cell phone, checking Facebook, because soon they'd have no signal.

"Quit fooling with that phone," his father called down from the wheelhouse. "Like a baby on a titty. I swear."

Wes clenched his jaw and pocketed his cell phone. Starboard was a peninsula bowered with dwarf oak and scrub pine. Through the rushes Wes could see a small graveyard, bone-white mausoleums like crooked teeth, a brick fireplace like a basilisk in a clearing. An antebellum mansion belonging to the Robicheaux, a five-generation Creole family, once stood here. They'd evacuated before the storm and when they returned they found everything in ruins and went back to Texas. Last Wes heard, they were running a fried chicken stand in Galveston.

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.