Double Wide by Leo W. Banks
2018 Spur Award Winner for Best First Novel
2018 Spur Award Winner for Best Contemporary Western
True West Magazine’s Best Western Crime Novel of the Year
After fastball phenom Prospero Stark’s baseball career craters in a Mexican jail, he retreats to a trailer park in the scorching Arizona desert. He lives in peaceful anonymity with a collection of colorful outcasts until someone leaves his former catcher’s severed hand on his doorstep. Beautiful, hard-living reporter Roxanne Santa Cruz, who keeps a .380 Colt and a bottle of Chivas in her car, joins Stark to help him uncover his friend’s fate, a dangerous pursuit that pits them against a ruthless gang of drug-dealing killers.
Books by Leo W. Banks
The Flying Z
Will Zachary leads an isolated existence running The Flying Z, a struggling, southern Arizona ranch on the Mexico border, with his aging, dementia-stricken Uncle and a ragtag crew of of fellow cowboys and town folk. His ordered life dramatically changes when Merry O'Hara, driving cross-country on her way to grad school at Stanford, takes a wrong turn into a ditch on his land...and right into the middle of a war he's fighting with a vicious cartel smuggling drugs across his ranch. Against all odds, Will and Merry are drawn to each other, at the same time they're desperately fighting, out-manned and out-gunned, to protect the ranch and their lives.
.45-Caliber Perfume
Arizona businessman Henry Belmont’s senate campaign is looking good. The cash contributions are rolling in and Mary Rose Cleary, his sexy, young campaign manager and mistress, is happy to handle the flow, as long as she can secretly pocket her cut. Complicating the picture is Henry’s conniving wife Barbara, a fading beauty with a secret criminal past and a deadly agenda. But Mary and Barbara share more than a bed with handsome Henry. They both love guns, money and sex...and know how to use them to get what they want. Now, in the brutal heat of a Phoenix summer, the lives of this scheming trio will collide in a violent explosion of betrayal, greed and murder.
Champagne Cowboys
The long-awaited sequel to DOUBLE WIDE, the double Spur Award winning novel.
Double Wide
Disgraced former baseball phenom Prospero Stark turns detective when someone leaves his former catcher's severed hand on the doorstep of his Airstream trailer. DOUBLE 2018 SPUR AWARD WINNER!!
Reviews For Double Wide
DOUBLE WIDE is a rollicking page-turner. As twisted and bumpy as a desert road at night. Leo Banks crafts a fast-paced tale filled with colorful characters. He displays an excellent ear for bitter, cynical dialog and an unsparing eye for desperate characters running on empty. Read it!
Double Wide is classic crime in its best new clothes, Goodis-style grand failure and Chandler’s streetwise knight welded to the same frame and left baking in the Arizona desert till only the essential remains. Great writing line to line, wonderful evocation of place, each sentence edged with grit and humor – here where death is another story’s start-up
The book is so good that it’s hard to believe it’s a debut novel. Banks crafted his fast-moving plot expertly. The yarn is exceptionally well-written, Banks’s descriptions of the Arizona desert so vivid that you’ll rush to turn up the air conditioner, his portrayals of his colorful characters so memorable that you’ll find yourself wondering what else those who survived the tale are up to once you finish the last page
DOUBLE WIDE is a fast-driving thriller. Dusty and wicked and satisfying.
Banks' strong noir debut will remind many of early Joe Lansdale. Smart dialogue helps propel the tight plot.
