STANDOFF - A Suspense Thriller Set in America's South
Hugo N. Gerstl
America’s South. Fifty years ago, Libertyville had a population of 2,000 and its citizens thought it would be the next Atlanta. But today, the population is down to 278 and falling. The town’s one remaining employer, the outdated, money-losing Libertyville Cotton Works, owned by Holocaust survivor Moses Mendelssohn, has been sold to a conglomerate that intends to declare the site a toxic waste dump and reap huge tax and political benefits.
Bishop William Wyatt Walker, spellbinding African-American televangelist whose church takes in five hundred million dollars a year from contributions of the poorest of the poor, decides that the church has “lost touch with the common man” and needs a new symbol of salvation – the Libertyville Cotton Works and the forty acres that surround it. He’ll create “God’s Country,” a Disneyland for the Faithful, and he’ll do whatever it takes, by means fair or foul, to make sure the church gets the property.
But meanwhile, a brilliant, half-crazed Mexican-American lawyer and his militant contingent take armed control of the cotton works, holding everyone connected with it hostage until the factory and its acreage are deeded to his “army” as the first truly Mexican town in the Southeast.
Thus the stage is set for a Standoff of epic proportions. Like James Dickey’s Deliverance, this powerful, suspenseful novel explores the best – and the worst – in the human spirit as it thunders to a spine-chilling climax. A must- read book that you won’t be able to put down – and one you’ll long remember.
About the author: see “Scribe”.
240 pages, 15X22.5 cm
| 
