Hard Twisted

"Hard Twisted is fictional crime, with an exceptional true story as its spine, written in prose as stylish and engaging as one will find . . . [A] compelling saga of murder, mystery, and good and evil at its rawest in the hardscrabble rural Southwest of the 1930s."—Vincent Bugliosi, author of Helter Skelter and Four Days in November

In May 1934, outside of Hugo, Oklahoma, a homeless man and his thirteen-year-old daughter are befriended by a charismatic drifter, newly released from the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. The drifter, Clint Palmer, lures father and daughter to Texas, where the father, Dillard Garrett, mysteriously disappears, and where his daughter, Lucile, begins a one-year ordeal as Palmer's captive on a crime spree—culminating in the notorious Greenville, Texas, "skeleton murder" trial of 1935.

C. Joseph Greaves weaves a chilling tale of survival and redemption, encompassing iconic landscapes, historic figures, America's last Indian uprising, and one of the most celebrated criminal trials of the Public Enemy era, all rooted in the intensely personal story of a young girl's coming of age in a world as cruel as it is beautiful.

C. Joseph Greaves is a former L.A. trial lawyer now based in Santa Fe. His discovery of two human skulls in a remote Utah canyon would lead, eighteen years later, to the completion of Hard Twisted, named Best Historical Novel of 2010 in the SouthWest Writers international writing contest, in which Greaves was also honored with the grand-prize Storyteller Award. Greaves is also writing an L.A.-based mystery series; the first installment, Hush Money, recently published by Minotaur.