Loaded guns, ladies of the night, broken neon, broken dreams. Here is a world that is immediately recognizable — through a shot glass at three A.M. This is life with rough edges, in a novel that gives you the straight goods — point blank — one cold, snowbound Christmas Eve in Kansas. One single night, defined in shadings of black and white, when everything changes....

For most, the city is closing up. For a few outsiders, this night, Christmas Eve 1979, is just beginning. Charlie Arglist is a lawyer saying goodbye to Wichita by revisiting the landscape of his used up life: the cold stare of his angry ex-wife, the empty strip clubs and bars where loneliness turns a profit, the frozen glare of ex-lovers and cops long snuggled in his deep pockets. Club owner Renata, an elegant dish in a smoky dive, dreams of financial prosperity and holds a single frame of a stolen film that could help her achieve them. And there's Vic. He's got a reputation, a bad temper, and a secret worth half a million dollars. Not to mention a knack for bringing people together...for the last time. Before the night is over, the decisions they face and the choices they make will irrevocably alter the course of their lives — if they can live long enough to see Christmas Day sunrise.

?[A] funny, craftily malevolent first novel, an ice-pick-sharp crime story that sustains its film noir energy all the way to an outrageous whammy of an ending.?

?The New York Times

?[An] astonishing debut novel from a writer who manages to put a funny, modernist spin on a piece of our noir past: Jim Thompson frosted with a blast of Jonathan (Motherless Brooklyn) Lethem.?

?Chicago Tribune

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Lawyer Charlie Arglist is looking to say goodbye to Wichita by revisiting the landscape of his used-up life. Yet before the sun rises, before he can leave town with a suitcase of stolen money, Charlie's ultimate scam explodes, uncovering a world full of twists that offers no mercy and allows few survivors.

Scott Phillips was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, and lived for many years in France. He now lives with his wife and daughter in Southern California, where he is currently at work on his second novel.