The Night of the Long Knives

In the Deathlands, every stranger is a killer until proven otherwise, and most of them prove it. Ray Baker, bald, scarred and pushing forty, is a hundred miles from Nowhere when a blue-eyed young woman with a steel hook for a right hand falls into step beside him. Neither speaks. Each is weighing the two urges every Deathlander knows: kill the other, or take them to bed.

Before they can settle it, a stranger from one of the walled enclaves comes stalking out of the haze, and a cheerful old murderer called Pop turns up with stories, coffee and a proposition. Ray and Alice are about to find out what the enclaves want out here, and whether two people built for murder can learn to want anything else.