Mucho Mojo

One of the most savagely original, dazzlingly versatile authors on the scene today, Joe R. Lansdale attracts greater critical acclaim, more awards, and thousands of new, devoted readers with every work of suspense, horror, western, or graphic fiction. Now, he combines the finest elements of each of these literary forms in Mucho Mojo, a masterpiece of regional marvels and dark suspense, sure to be reckoned his most fabulous achievement to date.
Under the blister of a Texas sun, you distract your mind or watch it die. For Hap Collins, slaving in the rose fields of July, the diversion is fantasies of iced tea and willing women. For Leonard Pine's Uncle Chester, the mental deterioration is too fatally advanced. Dying in the slums of LaBorde, he no longer despises with the same passion his gay nephew Leonard. He ignores the crack house next door. And he forgets about what he'd buried under the floorboards of his house.
He does remember to erect a forbidding "battle tree": a ragged post festooned with glass, designed to ward off black magic.
When Leonard and his old friend Hap clean out Uncle Chester's house, they dig up a small skeleton, wrapped in pornographic magazines - along with a grotesque link between an unsolved series of child murders and Leonard's late relative and guardian. Thinking white, Hap wants to call the police. But Leonard, intimate with the unwritten codes in his black part of town, persuades his partner to help clear Chester's name, sans outside reinforcement. Together, they unearth the deepest, ugliest truth of all.
Suspense sublimely laced with Texas Gothic, Mucho Mojo deftly blends race and romance, sex and death, the too good to be true and the too dark to imagine.