A new political thriller from the author of bestselling novel The Essay. Lester Yates is the notorious Egypt Valley Strangler, one of the country’s most prolific serial killers. Or, is he? Yates is two months from his date with the executioner when Ohio Attorney General Hutch Van Buren is presented with evidence that could exonerate him. But Yates is a political pawn, and forces exist that don’t want him exonerated, regardless of the evidence. To do so could derail presidential aspirations and change the national political landscape. Yates’ execution will clear a wide political path for many influential people, including Van Buren, who must battle both the clock and a political machine of which he is a part. Robin Yocum has been compared with E. Annie Proulx for his authenticity of place, and Elmore Leonard for his well-laid plots and perfect pacing. Arcade is thrilled to publish The Sacrifice of Lester Yates, which is Yocum at his best: suspenseful, political, and smart.

Narrator of Favorite Sons Hutch Van Buren is fifteen years old, playing sports and searching for arrowheads in a small industrial town in Ohio with his three closest friends when an altercation between the comrades and Petey Sanchez, a troubled seventeen- year-old, leads to Petey’s accidental death. Together, Hutch and his friends become ensnared in a web of secrets and moral dilemmas. A local ne’er-do-well goes to jail for the crime while the boys keep their pact of silence. Each boy shoulders the burden of truth in his own way as each attempts to leave the past behind. Thirty-three years later, in 2004, Van Buren is the prosecuting attorney in Summit County, Ohio, and a candidate for state attorney general when he learns that he and his boyhood friends weren’t the only ones keeping a secret about Petey’s death. A convicted sex offender in need of a favor attempts to blackmail Van Buren in return for his silence. Van Buren must decide between his political career and the duty of the office he has sworn to uphold. With the clock ticking, Van Buren has a week to seek out his boyhood friends and search his soul while he sorts out three decades of deceit he helped create. Favorite Sons is a wonderful, suspenseful novel with nuanced, memorable characters and unpredictable plot twists.

During the four-plus years that Robin Yocum was the police reporter for the Columbus Dispatch, he covered more than 1,000 deaths. Some were flukes; some were deserved. He interviewed decorated cops and transvestites, pimps, prostitutes, and pushers, killers, and child molesters. He went on drug, porn, and moonshine raids. He waded through cornfields looking for missing planes and children, a county landfill in a vain search for child pornography, through a squalid home with knee-high trash and a flooded basement where a family of ducks had taken up residence. He ruined so many slacks and shoes that he began wearing Sansabelt and cowboy boots because he needed something he could hose off at the end of his shift. Dead Before Deadline...and Other Tales from the Police Beat chronicles Yocum's years on the police beat for the Dispatch. The tales are sometimes sad, and sometimes funny, and sometimes in odd combination of both. Yocum takes the reader into the life behind the pyline and into the gritty world of crime reporting. It is not a rehash of old headlines, but Yocum explores his interactions with people who made headlines for all the wrong reasons. He tells of a prison interview with a 17-year-old who had murdered both parents; recounts the words of a mother who lost her son to senseless violence; and details a grieving father's plan to kill his former son-in-law. The police beat is not without its humor, and Yocum captures the personalities of the oddball set of characters. Yocum has woven together these vignettes into a compelling book that will fascinate and enthrall readers.

Jimmy Lee Hickam grew up along Red Dog Road, a dead-end strip of gravel and mud buried deep in the bowels of Appalachian Ohio. It is the poorest road, in the poorest county, in the poorest region of the state. To make things worse, the name Hickam is synonymous with trouble. Jimmy Lee hails from a heathen mix of thieves, moonshiners, drunkards, and general anti-socials that for decades have clung to both the hardscrabble hills and the iron bars of every jail cell in the region. This life, Jimmy Lee believes, is his destiny, someday working with his drunkard father at the sawmill, or sitting next to his arsonist brother in the penitentiary. There aren’t many options if your last name is Hickam. An inspiring coach and Jimmy Lee's ability to play football are the only things motivating him to return for his junior year of high school—until his visionary English teacher cuts him a break and preserves his eligibility for the coming football season. To thank her, Jimmy Lee writes a winning essay in the high school writing contest. When irate parents and the baffled administration claim he has cheated, his teacher is inspired to take his writing talent as far as it can go, showing him the path out of the hills of Appalachia. Terrific characterizations, surprising revelations, gut-wrenching past betrayals, and an unforgettable cast of characters born of the dusty, worn-out landscape of southeastern Ohio make The Essay a powerful, evocative, and incredibly moving novel.

A 2017 EDGAR® AWARD FINALIST! Amanda Baron died in a boating accident on the Ohio River in 1953. Or, did she? While it was generally accepted that she had died when a coal barge rammed the pleasure boat she was sharing with her lover, her body was never found. Travis Baron was an infant when his mother disappeared. After the accident and the subsequent publicity, Travis’s father scoured the house of all evidence that Amanda Baron had ever lived, and her name was never to be uttered around him. Now in high school, Travis yearns to know more about his mother. With the help of his best friend, Mitch Malone, Travis begins a search for the truth about the mother he never knew. The two boys find an unlikely ally: an alcoholic former detective who served time for falsifying evidence. Although his reputation is in tatters, the information the detective provides about the death of Amanda Baron is indisputable—and dangerous. Nearly two decades after her death, Travis and Mitch piece together a puzzle lost to the dark waters of the Ohio River. They know how Amanda Baron died, and why. Now what do they do with the information?

Close to midnight on May 17, 1951, four north Alabama lawmen drove to a bootlegger’s home to serve an arrest warrant. Before the clock struck twelve, the bootlegger lay dead in front of the house he shared with his wife and eight children, and three of the four officers were also dead. Afterward, a sixteen-year-old boy would face a series of trials that would divide a county and thrust the state of Alabama into the national spotlight. In this good, old-fashioned, true-crime story, Lesa Carnes Shaul draws on court documents, trial transcripts, newspaper articles, and personal interviews to weave together a rollicking and illuminating tale of murder and revenge. Besides the shooting itself and the subsequent trials, the narrative explores the cultural shifts that occurred after World War II in the United States, the Deep South, and the state of Alabama in particular. Immediately after the war, many southern states, still recovering from the lingering effects of the Great Depression, stood poised to advance toward a progressive New South yet struggled with the legacy of race and class inequities, retrograde government policies, and a stubborn resistance to change. Sand Mountain represented a kind of “land that time forgot” during this era, even as nearby cities like Huntsville and Birmingham sought to claim a place on the national stage in technology, industry, business, and medicine. Through her investigation of these murder trials, Shaul reveals the backwoods justice at play in this isolated area of the American South.