Baer Creighton

Ever since his brother electrocuted him as a boy, Baer Creighton feels an electric tingle when people lie to him. He lives in the woods, stills unrivaled moonshine, and limits human contact to regular buyers, his niece Mae, and her three kids. It’s a good life, sharing humor and philosophy with his sole companion Fred, a back-sassin' pit bull getting on in years, until Fred goes missing then arrives dumped in a ditch, a victim of a local dog-fighting ring. Armed with a Smith & Wesson, audacity, and a moonshiner's know-how, Baer hunts the dog thief.

Six days before Baer Creighton cut down a cabal of dogfighters, a 16-year-old girl disappeared while walking home from school in Asheville, North Carolina. Witnesses later claimed they saw her in the back of a police car. Twenty-five years before that, an illegal fireworks plant blew up in Benton, Tennessee, killing 11, and raining M100 firecrackers over half a county. A few days later, a 13-year-old boy learned his highest calling was murder.

Luke Graves turned the family butcher business into an empire by cutting fat off the ledger as well as he cut meat off the bone. He also learned many men sold beef, but few sold girls and boys. Demand was high - especially for the ones with brown skin - and supply, small. One evening, returning to Williams, Arizona, a chavo bolts the truck and runs for the plain. Cephus Graves takes him down with a deer rifle...In the woods 200 yards away, Baer Creighton looks up from his fire. He has a nose for evil men and he’s found a clan of them. But he’s met his match in Luke Graves.

With Baer Creighton hidden inside a mountain, Stinky Joe survives the wild Flagstaff winter alone. But with first melt, he succumbs to warm broth and sleeping pills, placed at the doorstep of a scheming prostitute at the vortex of a politician looking for an issue, a money-launderer wielding leverage, and his 83 year old meth-dealing target. Stinky Joe learned as a pup: don’t ever bite a man. He’ll beat you near death. But cornered in a bath tub by a pothead with a gun, Joe goes outlaw.

The girls yammer all the way to Colorado and Baer's ready for a change. Stinky Joe concurs. But a random Rocky Mountain storm combines with a slippy transmission to force Baer to the side of the road to be rescued by an unwitting cop with a secret. Sometimes good men contemplate evil out of love. Sometimes they need an accomplice with backwood skills...and a reputation that precedes him. Sometimes they're a day late.

Picking up the story with Baer on the road to North Carolina and Tat and Corazon in the motel with the hot tub, disaster is moments away. Baer, audiobook number six, is packed with more action, wit, and destruction than any audiobook in the series so far. It's more brutal, more funny, more heartbreaking, and more enlightening.