Three stories - the never-before-published 'Picket Line' along with 'Chick Killer' and 'Ice
Man' - showing Elmore Leonard at his most terse and thrilling 'Like all of Leonard's books
Picket Line is a taut and engaging tale. Crime dramas made Leonard famous but this is a
social-justice story. . . . Leonard renders their adventures and their thoughts in spare
elegant Hemingway-inspired prose. . . . Picket Line builds a convincing portrait of the spirit
of a lost idealistic age. . . . It has the cinematic mastery of scene and dialogue that
characterized Leonard's later works' - Héctor Tobar The New York Times There are some lines
you should never cross... Trouble is in the air at Stanzik Farms Texas. The workers have
gone on strike and tensions are threatening to boil over. As secrets come to a head and migrant
workers cops foremen agitators and union bosses collide at the picket line things start to
get very rough indeed. Elmore Leonard's brilliantly orchestrated never-before-published story
Picket Line is accompanied here by two more terse tales of ruthless enforcers and tense
stand-offs riffing on the thing that made him great: his extraordinary ear for dialogue and
for creating situations where the stakes could not be higher for the loser.
