The Storm Giants by Pearce Hansen

What makes a child tend toward the darkness? Nature? Nurture?

What can make a man turn his back on everything he’s ever held for true? Make him walk away from the money, the willing women, the power over people. From the terror he sees in their eyes when the storm giants come out to play.

Doctor Dauffenbach’s widow is knocking on Everett’s door, talking like they’re still an item. It’s unfortunate there’s so many obstacles in the way of making her heart stop.

Everett’s wife Kerri is beginning to suspect his history with the widow, and she’s forced to examine things about their life together that she’s successfully ignored since the beginning.

Everett’s mom Bambi is on her death bed and still manages to foul things up for him. Maybe she did try to rescue him from the storm giants when he was a kid – but she never tried to rescue him from the things he saw under her roof.

Everett’s son Raymond trusts him to keep the howling winds of chaos away. But to keep his family alive he has to break every promise, and return to the crazy-clown, evil-funhouse mindset he thought he’d left forever.

Throughout, the treacherous storm giants will be his only friends. They’ll help him review the lessons he learned as a child: that blood isn’t shy about spilling, and that it always means something to somebody when people leak.

Everett knows the catechism of blood to his core, and there can’t possibly be any fairy tale ending for him and his.

Can there?

THE STORM GIANTS is available from Amazon.

*****

Trent Zelazny (author of Too Late to Call Texas): “Storm Giants is without a doubt THE BEST work this author has produced so far, and this says a lot, considering how fantastic his other books are. Gritty and intense but filled with humanity, characters so real and filled with depth you completely forget that these people have been conjured from the author’s imagination. This book, in my opinion, should already be on the best seller list, or at the very least it belongs on a shelf alongside George V. Higgins and Elmore Leonard. I read a LOT of crime novels, both new and old, and can easily say that The Storm Giants is the best crime novel I’ve read this year. So take note. This is one you definitely don’t want to miss.”

Raymond Embrack (author of the Peter Surf series): “Pearce Hansen’s new novel is his best yet. This is one of my best reads in years. It’s one of those while you’re reading it you go back and reread parts because they’re that good. There isn’t a scene that is less than compelling. None of the characters are forgettable after you read them. This is both a textbook on what makes a badass and the study of a man discovering the scale of his damage and the humanity just beyond his reach. Of the many cool things about this novel the coolest is watching his reach get closer to it.”

*****

Pearce Hansen is an East Bay native who writes about what he knows: the streets of Oakland and her sister cities where he grew up. His work inspired by his experiences on those blocks, Pearce has been writing 16 years with over 100 publications including six anthology inclusions, three novels and a short story collection. Pearce resides up on the Lost Coast behind the Redwood Curtain, empty nesting it with his wife and their spoiled fat Egyptian Mau cat.