STALEMATE: There Can Be No Winners

Hugo N. Gerstl

Fifty years ago, Libertyville, Alabama population 2,000, was poised to become the next Atlanta. But today, the population is 278 and falling. The town’s remaining employer, Libertyville Cotton Works, owned by an 81-year-old Holocaust survivor, has been sold to a conglomerate that intends to reap huge tax and political benefits.

But two other factions have different ideas. The spellbinding African-American televangelist whose church takes in $500 million a year from the poorest of the poor, decides the church needs a new symbol of salvation – the Libertyville Cotton Works and its surrounding 40 acres. He’ll do whatever it takes to ensure the church gets the property.

Meanwhile, a brilliant, half-crazed Mexican-American lawyer, faced with the new President’s attitude toward “illegals, gang-bangers, and criminals,” seeks to create his own Sanctuary Nation. His “army” takes control of the cotton works, holding hostages to ensure the factory and its acreage are deeded to “the first truly Mexican town in the Southeastern U.S.”

The stage is set for a Stalemate of epic proportions, a war where there can be no winners. Like James Dickey’s Deliverance, Stalemate is a mixture of thriller, adventure, camaraderie, dread, and the horror that only an unexpected, unspeakable situation can inflict. Human nature is human nature; it is impossible to predict how anyone would act confronted with a similar situation. Powerful and suspenseful, Stalemate explores the best – and worst – in the human spirit as it thunders to a spine-chilling climax.

Multiple international best-selling author Hugo N. Gerstl’s (Scribe, Against All Odds, The Wrecking Crew, Assassin, Arcade, Billy Jenkins) work is a page-turner you can’t put down; one you’ll long remember.

An English-language North-American edition was published in Fall 2018. 184 Pages.