The Day Hal Quit

Hal couldn't remember his mother at all, but he did remember his father, Savor Mull, who had taught him to ride saddle horses and shoot a Henry rifle and rope calves well enough to win two junior team roping titles. Orphaned at ten, Hal grew into a cautious, pensive man, and the people who know him best see it as his flaw. His Aunt Henrietta, who raised him and "didn't put no stock in rodeo," said he was the only man she ever knew who went to war to avoid a fight. His best friend thinks he's a coward. The woman he lives with wants to know what it takes to make him mad. And the girl who falls in love with him thinks of him as someone who never resists anything in life, as if he is just letting it carry him along like a piece of driftwood in a river. Hal's working as a bartender for minor-league power broker, Wayne Judd. After drinking a few on Saturday night, Hal always feels like he knows what his next step will be, but in the morning the next step has been forgotten, and he's in his apartment staring at the ceiling, wondering why he drinks so much. But there is another Hal, the man who never turns down a perilous job when duty calls, whether it's facing the Chinese hordes at Chosin Reservoir or protecting a teenage girl from drug smugglers at the Mexican border. As with Hal, Judd's daughter Tara faced a crisis in her youth--an incident that she never talks about, but one that is making her more defiant about life and less trusting of people, especially men. When she is suspended from her high school for distribution of drugs, Judd puts her to work in the bar, where, he insists, she can learn how the real world works, under the direct control of him and his staff. But what Judd gets is not what he was expecting. As passive as he usually is, it is easy for Hal to just stay out of Tara's way, to "live and let live," and ironically, this is what attracts her to him. Tara has had dozens of flings and boyfriends, but Hal is different from any of them, and they begin a secret friendship that may be a little more than either one of them can handle, even without a complication. But the complication does come, in the form of drug smuggling and rip-offs and machine gun fire. The Day Hal Quit is a suspense-filled crime drama, but it is a great deal more. This is a novel of ineluctable seductions, tests of loyalty and dangerous, tragic love. Hal is an ordinary man who, faced with the absence of faith all around him, takes what he thinks is the honorable course of action, to save a girl, to save her love, to save the human spirit.