Tweakerville

Jesse is 17, eighty-sixed from his honest working-class Hawai i family home, living with the dealer and his crew, running drugs on his moped, useful because he is still legally a juvenile. Partied out, he drops off to sleep and wakes up with a strange girl lying next to him, dead, ODd on crystal methamphetamine, ice. Call the ambulance? No way. That would bring the cops, and the house is loaded with drugs. Gotta get rid of the body. Jesse digs the grave, deep. And he keeps getting pulled deeper into the nightmare universe of crystal meth: tweakers, chronics and ice sluts, bulls and hammers, tattooed gangstas who swing machete and pull trigger. In a crazed and violent world outside the law, Jesse wants to believe in some kind of code of honor. Banished from his own family, he needs to believe in some kind of human connection. But ice is savage it can twist loyalty into treachery and betrayal. Ice rules life, and ice can decree death. This is the story that Jesse is compelled to tell, and Tweakerville is compulsive reading, appalling and enthralling from killer opening to killer ending. A shockingly powerful novel that pulls us into the world of crystal meth. The characters are our neighbors, our cousins, our brothers, the ones who break our hearts. A breathtaking debut.

Author: Alexei Melnick