Petrified Dreams

With women going missing across the Deep South, dynamic detective duo Hap and Leonard zero in on a horrific, chimerical villain protected and abetted by Texas’ most powerful.

“Joe R. Lansdale is to crime fiction what Willie Nelson is to country music: . . . raw, gritty, soulful, and lastly, timeless.”—May Cobb, author of The Hunting Wives

The sun never sets on justice, but it may finally be setting on the beloved crime fighting duo of Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. The two opposites—brothers from another mother—have called the detecting business quits, but when a prop plane holding the bodies of several kidnapped women crashes into their favorite watering hole, the boys know they’re in for one last effort. With the help of a victim’s sister, they learn that a network of men has stolen vulnerable young women on behalf of a horrifying, charismatic villain known as The Artist, a sculptor of living things, including his own body, and protected by the elite of the South. But the Artist refuses to be found, and every lead brings Hap and Leonard into the crosshairs of something even more dangerous. Finding The Artist is a long shot, and getting out alive is even less likely.

Perhaps the darkest, funniest, and most intense of the Hap & Leonard mysteries, Petrified Dreams concludes the revered series as audaciously as one would expect from the mojo master of Southern crime and wit.

• “How do you end a series like Hap and Leonard? Well, if you're Joe R. Lansdale, the mojo master himself, you swing for the fences! You throw the biggest, wildest, Texas-sized haymaker, and the punch doesn't just land; it explodes. . . This last one's go the heart of a lion.”
  Eli Cranor, author of Don't Know Tough
• “This muscle-car paced thriller is by turns funny, gruesome, and sentimental, and with a master like Lansdale pulling the strings, it all comes together beautifully. A fittingly wild send-off for a pair of beloved scoundrels.”
  Richard Lange, author of Rovers
• “A satisfying mystery. . . Lansdale leavens the grimness with splashes of humor. It's a worthy send-off for Hap and Leonard.”
  Publishers Weekly
• Previous praise for Joe R. Lansdale:
  
  "There's humor and then there's gallows humor. The Hap & Leonard books of Joe R. Lansdale embrace the latter with a martini-dry wit (not that anyone in these rough and tumble books is asking for a martini, shaken or not)."I>Parade
  
  "When funky books need to be written, Joe R. Lansdale writes them." I>New York Times Book Review
  
  "Has a wonderfully warped way with words. In his hands, everyone can curse a blue streak, and it comes out as profane poetry." 
  Dallas Morning News