On his 22nd birthday, Walter Van Brunt is haunted by the ghosts of the past. In the night, he races - drunk and high - on his motorcycle against a memorial plaque. It commemorates an event that happened a long time ago, but is directly linked to Walter. From then on, he sets out in search of the truth about his deceased father: Truman Van Brunt had changed sides twenty years earlier, during the infamous Peterskill riots, not only driving his wife to her death, but also destroying the family. But Walter's story goes even deeper - it is part of a cycle of betrayal and broken loyalty that took place generations earlier. Driven by the same ghosts as his ancestors, Walter finally stumbles into his own fate - and pays bitterly for the betrayal. With dark imagination, black humor and a sense of the superreal, Boyle draws a dark, unsparing reading of American history. Biography (T. C. Boyle) T. C. Boyle, born in 1948 in Peekskill, New York in the Hudson Valley, was a teacher at the local high school and published his first short stories during this time. Today he lives in California and teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. New product