Tomato Red — Daniel Woodrell

In Tomato Red, Woodrell brings together a trio of ill-starred hustlers headed down a road paved with schemes, scams, botched chances, and broken dreams.

In the small Ozark town of West Table, MO, where you're born is what you are. And if it happens to be the Venus Holler section of town, that isn't much. But nineteen-year-old Jamalee Merridew isn't going to spend the rest of her natural life in a place so far on the wrong side of the tracks you can't even hear the whistle blowing. She has plans: to take her brother Jason, "the prettiest boy in the Ozarks," and get as far away from Vern.
Holler--and their prostitute mother--as she can. Enter drifter and petty felon Sammy Barlach. A loser who hit a backslide the day he was born, he's the unlikely hero who just may be their ticket out.