The Transgressors

On the day he accidentally killed Aaron McBride, Tom Lord went from being a sheriff's deputy to a man awaiting execution. Because if the law didn't punish him, his victim's widow--or his shadowy business associates--surely would.

Library Journal

With many of his 29 titles still in print and film versions of The Grifters, After Dark, My Sweet, and the recent remake of The Getaway, Thompson is still a hot property more than 15 years after his death. Not only is Thompson popular with the public, he is also revered by other writers, such as James Ellroy and Stephen King, who provide introductions to two of these novels, which first appeared in 1946, 1942, and 1961, respectively.

On the day he accidentally killed Aaron McBride, Tom Lord went from being a sheriff's deputy to a man awaiting execution. Because if the law didn't punish him, his victim's widow—or his shadowy business associates—surely would.

The Transgressors is a novel of hair-trigger tension and mind-boggling reversals, a one-way trip into the desolate territory that Jim Thompson mapped and staked out as his own and populated with tarnished cops, conniving hustlers, and ingeniously sadistic thugs.