Leaving Disneyland /

Doc Kane has served 16 years of a 20-year murder sentence in a federal penitentiary in the Nevada desert. In a rage, he killed his son-in-law for beating his daughter. As the possibility for parole approaches, Doc walks a tightrope. His new cell mate is an arrogant young thug, a drug dealer who has murdered the brother of a fellow inmate and member of Doc's gang in his hometown of Washington, D.C. Doc is torn between old loyalty to his gang and the need to walk the straight and narrow to get out of prison. After meeting tests of loyalty and violence at the hands of guards and fellow inmates, Doc finally manages to make parole. But he can't free himself from a past that literally haunts him. Back in D.C., an aging ex-con, Doc has to stay away from friends and family, guaranteeing that he will struggle mightily, in isolation, with the square life. Parsons, winner of the AWP/Thomas Dunne Books Award, has written an intense novel about one man's efforts to survive and to reconcile himself with his violent past. --Vanessa Bush

In Hamlet, Denmark's a prison; in this novel of ghosts, jail cells and the undying past, there are prisons everywhere, which accounts for the aura of bleak misery that hovers over Doc Kane, who killed his son-in-law for beating up his daughter and is now serving time in Tyburn Penitentiary in Nevada. Kane, a member of the D.C. Blacks, is up for parole, but there's a hitch his new cellmate, Byron Cripps, killed a member of Doc's gang, and the other D.C. Blacks in Tyburn have Cripps marked for a quick and violent death. Harassed by a guard and haunted by Dead Earl, the ghost of a man who used to be Doc's runner back when he was a drug dealer, Doc can't escape his past in prison or back in D.C., when he finally makes it home. There's a noirish feel to this novel (which won the 2000-2001 AWP/ Thomas Dunne Books Award), and the question of whether Doc will be able to build a new life for himself or fall into the pit of his old one seems rhetorical at best. Yet the novel is not unremittingly gloomy. From the cadences of prison speech to the rituals of respect and disrespect that mean so much to men with little to live for, all is vividly authentic. With no happy Hallmark card climax, this downbeat, low-key story has an ending to match its uncompromising mood. By keeping the action real and not going over the top, Parsons has produced the novelistic equivalent of a great B-movie, its modest goals expertly realized. Agent, Kim Witherspoon. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In this insightful, troubling debut, a convict struggles to stay alive in prison, to avoid going back after he gets out, and to rise above the label society has stamped on him. Doc Kane is 16 years into a 20-year sentence for killing his abusive son-in-law with a shotgun. In scorpion-infested Tyburn prison, a place seemingly designed to bake its inmates in the Nevada desert sun, Doc has done what was necessary to survive, including dealing drugs and collecting debts for the D.C. Blacks, a gang he joined inside for protection. But now that his parole hearing is coming up, not keeping his nose clean means much worse than the customary time in the "hole": he'd have to serve out his next four years. So Doc is trying to walk the straight and narrow. But he's vulnerable to accusation when his gang brothers want to stage a revenge killing of another inmate, and it doesn't help that one hostile prison guard is eager to nail Doc for any violation he can. Nor is the struggle finished when Doc gets released: everything about his old life tugs at him to break parole and return to drug-dealing and robbery. First-novelist Parsons leavens the grim story with jailbird humor, and he makes it easy to sympathize with Doc's dilemma. He portrays his hero as a paradox: a sometimes vicious, sometimes compassionate man whose actions are governed by fealty to the street code, a set of rules that, though violent, are at the same time logical and fair. Doc's adherence to the code even while those around him break it makes him a man of honor, but living by its often illegal dictates means he's constantly in danger of going back to the slammer. An excellent attempt to portray criminality with the kind of sympathy and understanding that Steinbeck brought to indigence.