In a nation still recovering from the nuclear tragedies of forty years earlier, Clyde is working a dead-end guaranteed job at a diner, and Moonis is incarcerated in a Labor Camp for the Malcontented. But when Moonis's sister, Cecily, goes missing, the old friends escape their prisons to search for her in post-fallout America.

Moonis and Clyde follow Cecily's trail until it leads them into the atomic-ravaged heart of the Midwest, an outlaw territory of dark legends and darker truths where Cecily is being held captive by a brutal gang lord.

But along with menace and death, this poisoned wasteland contains the possibility of a freedom beyond imagination--if only Moonis and Clyde, and the misfits who join their quest, can find the heroism to grab hold of it.

William Lashner is the New York Times bestselling author of The Barkeep, The Accounting, Blood and Bone, and the Victor Carl novels, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages and sold across the globe. Writing under the pseudonym Tyler Knox, he is also the author of Kockroach, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Before retiring from law to write full time, Lashner was a prosecutor with the Department of Justice in Washington, DC. He is a graduate of the New York University School of Law as well as the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives outside Philadelphia with his wife and three children.