Green River Rising

In a remote corner of East Texas stands the Green River State Penitentiary, grim repository of human outcasts and primal passions. Here, 2,800 convicts sweat it out under the glare of the panoptic machine—a vast labyrinth of granite, glass, and steel, where the ancient violence of men lurches unseen toward a brutal cataclysm.

Dr. Ray Klein has served three years’ hard time working in the AIDS-infested prison infirmary, where he has learned the only effective survival mantra: not my fucking business. In the same hospital, forensic psychologist Juliette Devlin conducts the research she hopes will bring her a deeper understanding of the hearts of men. And in the sewers beneath the prison, the wretched, retarded giant Henry Abbott awaits instruction from the Word that is God.

On the day Klein wins his parole, the disciplinary perfection of the panopticon is torn apart by a paroxysm of tribal war: Green River explodes into a riot of unimaginable ferocity. For the first time in 147 years the prison falls entirely into the hands of its inmates. Trapped in the infirmary are the dying men Klein cares for—and Devlin, the woman he loves. When a crew of the prison’s most hot-blooded maniacs place the infirmary under siege, and as the River sucks them all—psychopaths and lovers, the dying and the insane—toward the abyss, Klein must face the ultimate choice: to play it safe and claim the freedom he yearns for, or to risk all in a desperate journey across the riot-torn penitentiary to save the ones he loves.

Dark, violent, sexy, and almost unbearably compelling, Green River Rising is that rare thing: a scintillating thriller that is at the same time sophisticated and literate and filled with wisdom about good and evil and duty and, above all, the redemptive power of love.