Purgatory, Mississippi

Four desperate men, three suffering from bloody gunshot wounds, sit low in an old Ford as it slowly moves through a fierce rainstorm along a night-darkened road in rural Wisconsin. They are trying to make it home, to Purgatory, Mississippi. The men have been driving for hours, from the time they limped out of a house that they had broken into, in Upton, Wisconsin, where they had been surprised by a man with a shotgun. That is the dramatic opening of Marco Manfre's new novel, PURGATORY, MISSISSIPPI, the story of Harlan Hughes, a man who just barely survived a brutal childhood and then fell into a pattern of break-ins and other crimes. Now, after twenty miserable years of that existence, he finds himself weighed down by a residue of agonizing regrets. As he and the other men travel, attempting to evade the police, Harlan decides that once he returns to Purgatory he will confront the blizzard of unresolved problems and disappointments that define his life and the profoundly painful sense of emptiness that he has long ignored, and attempt to make a new start. However, before he is able to do that he must deal with an unexpected deadly threat that awaits him in his hometown.