Excerpt from The Cold Millions by Jess Walter, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He flushed with sadness, as if every moment of his life were occurring all at once—his sister dying in childbirth, his mother squirming in that one-room flop, poor Danny sliding between wet logs, Gig in jail, and Jules dead—and how many more? All people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.

He remembered last winter hopping an open boxcar with Gig and seeing a body in the corner. He'd seen played-out bums before, but this one appeared to be a young woman, her long hair iced to the floor of the boxcar, frozen or starved or kidnapped or run off or just made dead somehow. How was it this girl was trash in the corner of a rattling freight box while Rye had hot water running through the floor and warm brandy in his guts? He wept for that girl, too, for what a learned man like Gig might've called humanity, a poor girl born in hunger and dirt, destined to die in a cold boxcar without ever imagining this room existed.

Lem Brand offered him a handkerchief, stitched, like everything, in gold. Rye stared at the handkerchief, and at Brand's clean, rounded fingernails. It was the softest thing he'd ever held to his face. Rye hated that he'd cried in front of Brand and did his best to fill the thing with dirty hobo snot before handing it back.

Excerpted from The Cold Millions by Jess Walter. Copyright © 2020 by Jess Walter. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.