Watch Me Go

Richard Price meets Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan in this soulful, riveting work of suspense by an author whose work has been praised by Salman Rushdie as “pure, muscular storytelling . . . irresistible.”

Douglas “Deesh” Sharp has survived in the Bronx on the right side of the law in spite of the constant lure of drug-dealing friends, paying rent by hauling junk for cash. Then comes the morning Deesh and two pals head upstate for a seemingly standard hauling job, and a woman pays them ＄1,000 to dispose of a sealed oil drum whose contents smell and weigh enough to contain a human corpse. Suspicious, yet ground down by underemployment, Deesh agrees to follow through on the job, only to realize he is now possibly mixed up in a serious crime. Panicked, he and his friends dump the drum on the side of a rural highway and make quick plans to start new lives someplace far away. But escaping their pasts isn’t so simple.
As things spiral drastically out of control, Deesh finds himself running for his life—the prime suspect in the murders of three white men. Jan Price, a young jockey who left difficulties of her own back home in Arkansas, holds promise as a rising star at a small racetrack in upstate New York, where her father was a local legend before his untimely death two decades earlier. As she spends time at the track, struggling to piece together her father’s mysterious past, Jan is increasingly charmed by wannabe horse farmer Tug and gets pulled into the gritty underworld of gambling and racing. When Tug’s father goes missing, Jan and Tug are convinced it wasn’t an accident. But when they finally solve the mystery behind his disappearance—and seemingly happen upon luck at the track—Tug vanishes, too. Interweaving Deesh’s and Jan’s gripping narratives,Watch Me Go is at once a compulsively readable work of suspense and a moving story about family and redemption.