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

When the Bayou Sweetheart reached the pass, the water was scrummed with boats passing back and forth within feet of each other, jockeying for position. A festive glow suffused the water from their red and green running lights. Horns shrilled madly in the night. Men screamed threats and curses from pilothouses and decks.

A tire-bumpered oyster lugger passed their boat. A wizened deckhand, maybe thirty, maybe sixty, impossible to tell, shouted at Wes. "Hey," he said. "Hey, lookit."

When Wes turned, the man tossed something from a tin cup. Wes twisted away, but too late. A foul-smelling yolk splattered across his face. Wes wiped with his hand and looked at his fingers. Chum.

The man and his crewmen cackled. Wes gagged against the fishy reek and cleaned his face with the end of his shirt. The man on the oyster lugger shucked down his waders and mooned him. His ass was enormous and inflamed-looking, like an orangutan's.

Wes's father slowed the boat to quarter-speed and Wes lowered the booms and dipped the nets into the water. Other boats passed within yards, laboring crewmen hunched in shadowy cameo. Wes moved between starboard and port, checking the booms.

A familiar round-bottomed shrimper, sixty feet long and hung with a Confederate flag, glided alongside them. The captain shouted something from the wheelhouse and Wes looked up. It was Randy Preston, a man who years ago worked on his father's boat. He grinned down with his too-big dentures and Wes gestured up at his father, who got on his megaphone and leaned out the starboard window. "What you got so far, Randy?"

"Nothing worth a shit."

"That bad?"

"Wife's gonna divorce me."

"Could be a good thing," said Wes's father.

"No shit." His boat was moving out of earshot so Randy had to shout quickly. "Heard on the radio they were catching a lot five miles west. I'm gonna see what's going on over there. Get out of this mess."

"Let me know if it's any good," Wes's father said.

"Yeah, yeah," Randy said. He held his arm out his window and made a jerk-off motion with his hand. "Keep a firm grip on yourself, Wes."

Wes grinned and shot a bird at Randy. Randy leaned out of his window and shot one back. After a while his boat drifted away and was lost among the rest. Wes hitched the starboard trawl to the winch. The motor smoked and strained and soon the swollen net emerged from the water like an amniotic sack, inside a squirming mass of fins and pincers and glinting black eyes. Then Wes went port and began winching up the other net.

His father put the boat in neutral and climbed down the wheelhouse ladder. With drip nets they dumped the haul into the sorting box and then they put on gloves and poked through the teeming pile. Hard-shell crabs snapping their pincers like castanets. Catfish and flounders and fingerling baitfish. Soft-shell crabs by the hundreds, so tiny and luminescently pale they looked like ghosts of themselves. A baby stingray whipping its barbed tail, a snapping turtle shooting its head back into its shell.

And then there were pinkie-sized shrimp, their brains and hearts beating like small black seeds beneath their rice paper skin.

"Worst I've ever seen," said Wes's father. His thousand-times- washed chest-stripe polo shirt, the same kind he always wore, was already stuck to his back with sweat.

Wes said nothing. He knew what was coming. His father was pissed and he was going to take it out on him. Wes was screwed if he said anything, screwed if he didn't.

"Gonna be out here for a fuckin' month."

Wes kept quiet, sorting through the fish and crabs and shrimp.

"This is it. This swamp is gonna fuck us. It's gonna fuck us like a thousand-dollar whore."

Wes flipped a baby catfish off the boat.

"Watch that sting-a- ree," his father said.

"I'm watchin' it."

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.