Authors: Marcus Brotherton
Feast for Thieves
Highly recommended! A hard-edged and well-crafted novel, with surreptitiously smart prose, confident plotting, and characters you feel you know.
MICHELLE BURFORD, founding senior features editor of
O, the Oprah Magazine
Feast for Thieves
is smart, gritty, and unforgettable. Filled with calamity and humor, this book is a hands-down winner. It’s about time veteran writer Marcus Brotherton added his powerful voice to fiction. His writing voice is superb.
TOSCA LEE,
New York Times
bestselling coauthor of the Book of Mortals series.
An exhilarating story told in a neo-Western genre, of all things. Masterful and riveting, humorous yet poignant. Anyone who enjoys books by Ted Dekker, Randy Alcorn, or Leif Enger will enjoy every story woven by Marcus Brotherton. This unique and page-turning adventure will harvest a whole new fold of fans.
JULIE CANTRELL,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Into the Free
Part
Band of Brothers
, part
True Grit
, this is the rollicking tale of a wartime hero’s fight to find his place in a post-war world. Rich with action,
Feast for Thieves
is cinematic storytelling at its best.
ADAM MAKOS,
New York Times
bestselling author of
A Higher Call
As a great admirer of Marcus Brotherton’s nonfiction work, I was eager to dive into his debut novel.
Feast for Thieves
does not disappoint. From the first page, Rowdy Slater emerges as a character to root for, complete with flaws, charm, and an unshakeable conscience. I enjoyed this story from beginning to end, a wonderful tale of redemption that will leave readers hoping for a sequel.
KRISTINA MCMORRIS, bestselling author of
The Pieces We Keep
A gutsy, never-preachy story filled with massive redemptive undercurrents. Why read this? Ultimately it’s a book of hope, and it shows how anyone’s heart can be changed.
MATT CARTER, lead pastor, Austin Stone Community Church, Texas, and coauthor of
The Real Win
Marcus Brotherton has crafted more than a rousing story here. He’s created characters who leap off the page and a small corner of the world you can lose yourself inside, all held together with stirring prose. I really enjoyed this book.
BILLY COFFEY, bestselling author of
The Devil Walks in Mattingly
This story is a delight. There is a strong sense of literary quality here, combined with a remarkably unique redemptive message. The characters are real, the descriptions potent, and the force of a good story well told is strong throughout. Highly recommended.
DAVIS BUNN, bestselling novelist, writer-in-residence at Regent’s Park College, Oxford University
© 2014 by
MARCUS BROTHERTON
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
The author is represented by the literary agency of WordServe Literary Group (
www.wordserveliterary.com
).
Edited by Pam Pugh
Interior design: Ragont Design
Cover design: Erik M. Peterson
Cover photo of man in water: copyright © by Pearl/Lightstock. All rights reserved.
Cover photo of landscape: copyright © by Im Perfect Lazybones/Shutterstock. All rights reserved.
Picture of paratrooper on back cover, courtesy the family of Joe Toye
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brotherton, Marcus.
Feast for thieves : a Rowdy Slater novel / Marcus Brotherton.
pages cm
Summary: “Sergeant Rowdy Slater is the most skilled-and most incorrigible-soldier in Dog Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne, an elite group of paratroopers fighting for the world’s freedom in World War II. Through a bizarre set of circumstances, Rowdy returns to the States after the war, turns his life around, and falls into the only job he can find-preacher at the sparsely populated community church in Cut Eye, Texas, a dusty highway town situated at the midpoint of nowhere and emptiness. The town’s lawman, suspicious that Rowdy has changed his ways only as a cover up, gives an ultimatum: Rowdy must survive one complete year as Cut Eye’s new minister or end up in jail. At first Rowdy thinks the job will be easy, particularly because he’s taking over for a young female missionary who’s held the church together while the men were at war. But when a dark-hearted acquaintance from Rowdy’s past shows up with a plan to make some quick cash, Rowdy becomes ensnared due to an irrevocable favor, and life turns decidedly difficult”-- Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-8024-1213-3 (paperback)
1. World War, 1939-1945--Veterans--Fiction. 2. Life change events--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.R64798F43 2014
813’.6--dc23
2014002536
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For the hungry and thirsty.
Part 1
ONE
MARCH 1946
W
hen it came to robbing the bank, we wasn’t polished or nothing. We just set the old truck’s hand brake and jigged out the side while the motor was still running, shrugged off the rain while throwing sacks over our heads to hide our faces, and bustled straight up the middle with our rifles aimed forward. Shoot, I never would have hurt nobody innocent. I just needed money real bad, like anyone does if he’s spent time in the clink and nobody will give him a job once he gets out.
Right through the front door, Crazy Ake walloped the guard over the back of the head and he went down like a sack of peas thrown on a stock house pallet, which I felt sorry about, but not much blood was coming out, so I ran to the counter and stuck my rifle up in the clerk’s skinny face so the man could see I wasn’t fooling. We was only carrying one sack to fill—mine—so as one partner could be more of the muscle if folks decided to fight back. Besides, it was a big sack, and the clerk stuffed it full while Crazy Ake strode back and forth up there on the countertop yelling about how he was the fires of hell and was pouring down wrath on the town.
All that yelling may not have been simple scare tactics with Crazy Ake. He was foaming around the edges of his mouth where the sack was cut for an airhole, and cursing a blue streak, and he
looked genuinely like his finger might twitch tight against the trigger and blow some man’s head away if aggravated enough. Yes sir, that worried me a mite. It did. But I didn’t offer much time to my worrying because once my sack was good and full we ordered the folks to lay down on the tile and count backward from five hundred to one while we skedaddled out the door and back to the truck for our getaway.