Gary Clifton

Kobok, a rough-edged and always on the edge ATF agent, is a rounder, a brawler, sometimes a drunk, and always in conflict with an inept government management. His rookie partner has matured into a streetwise veteran, and the always explosive Dallas Homicide Detective Bull Hooper remains the toughest guy on the block. Homer Wayne DuPree, self-made multimillionaire waste disposal magnate, is stunned when his long-time wife dies. He marries a prostitute. She and her lover decide to murder the old man for his fortune. They learn that murder is an inexact science and some folks take more killing than others. Kobok, convinced he's seen it all, soon realizes that identifying the players in the business of assassination is a whole new world.

In the mid 1980s, Kobock, a hard-drinking ATF agent, constantly in the doghouse of hostile, incompetent management and an indifferent bureaucracy, is assigned a dead end arson homicide wherein a young female victim is tired to a bed and burned alive. What appears to be another venture into frustration quickly becomes a sordid, violent trail of sin and degeneracy which wends its way though the Dallas underbelly of crime. In the end, he stumbles into a conclusion so bizarre and twisted that even his cynical mind cannot fully understand. (This is a recently revised version of Burn Sugar Burn, originally published by PaperJacks in 1988.)