From the Publisher

They busted out of McAlester State Penitentiary--three escaped convicts going to ground in a world unprepared for anything like them....

Lamar Pye is prince of the Dirty White Boys.  With a lion in his soul, he roars--for he is the meanest, deadliest animal on the loose....
Odell is Lamar's cousin, a hulking manchild with unfeeling eyes.  He lives for daddy Lamar.  Surely he will die for him....
Richard's survival hangs on a sketch: a crude drawing of a lion and a half-naked woman.  For this Lamar has let Richard live...

Armed to the teeth, Lamar and his boys have cut a path of terror across the Southwest, and pushed one good cop into a crisis of honor and conscience.  Trooper Bud Pewtie should have died once at Lamar's hands.  Now they're about to meet again.  And this time, only one of them will walk away....

Pixel Planet

Hunter’s writing style is crisp and compact, and flies along. He has a knack for boiling things down to simple, effective phrases. He also has a great knack at dialogue....If you’ve read crime novels in the past but have become bored with the genre, Dirty White Boys may be the cure.

Publishers Weekly

Often brilliant, and permeated by violence, Hunter's sixth thriller (after Point of Impact) details an escaped mad-dog killer's flight across the Southwest and a tortured state trooper's pursuit of him. Sadistic Lamar Pye is forced to break out of Oklahoma's McAlester State Penitentiary after he brutally murders a black inmate who tries to rape him. Pye takes with him his cousin, Odell, a retarded giant who obeys Pye's orders without question, and wimpy Richard Peed, an artist whose work has caught Pye's fancy. Pitted against this vicious trio and the slightly crazed woman who takes up with them is Sgt. Bud Pewtie of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, who suspects that his obsessive, troubled affair with the wife of his slain partner might have distracted him from an opportunity to end Pye's murderous spree early on. Pewtie mixes it up with the outlaws time and again until a final bloody face-off that threatens to tear his personal life apart. Throughout, Hunter cleverly humanizes Pye and his band in small ways that effectively counterpoint the horror of their actions, but these touches don't lessen the considerable tension he generates as his story clips through its twists and turns. Powerful and gripping, this could be Hunter's most popular novel yet. Movie rights to 20th Century Fox; Literary Guild selection. (Nov.)

Library Journal

After killing a black inmate, the brutal Lamar Pye breaks out of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary along with his retarded cousin, Odell, and a hapless artist-turned-felon named Richard. They embark on a desperate run across Oklahoma and Texas, pursued by state troopers. The escapees hide out with a convict groupie who has lived alone since murdering her parents as an adolescent. In a parody of domesticity, Lamar embraces these losers as the family he never knew. Unlettered Lamar is a natural leader, more intelligent by far than his pursuers, but his gang screws up every time at a terrible cost in bloodshed. Hunter's (Point of Impact, LJ 2/1/93) portrayal of Lamar is unromantic but sympathetic. Lamar is a loser who never had a chance; he uses his short period of freedom to get his own back and to indulge in the mindless violence that is the only thing that truly satisfies and delights him. This seriocomic chase thriller packs a punch. For most popular collections.-David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus

What People Are Saying

John Sandford
An exceptional thriller.

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Product Details

• ISBN: 044022179X
  
• ISBN-13: 9780440221791
• Format: Mass Market Paperback, 480pp
• Publisher: Dell Publishing
• Pub. Date: November 1995
• Edition Description: Reprint
• Sales Rank: 11,426