Publisher's Synopsis
In 1888 in Victoria, Texas, for a simple job, a Chicago private eye gets caught up in the poker game to end all poker games.
Shannon, a Chicago private detective, returns home to Galveston, Texas for a wedding. Galveston's new rabbi asks Shannon to find Nathan Silverberg, gone missing along with a group of swindlers who claim to be soliciting money for a future colony of Romanian Jewish refugees.
What seems to be a simple job soon pushes Shannon into stranger territory. His investigations lead him to a malevolent white-haired gambler, monstrous sand dune totems, and a group of skull-headed poker players trapped in an endless loop of cards and alcohol, who may be his only means to survive the business.
With The Silverberg Business, Robert Freeman Wexler has delivered a gloriously strange hard-boiled tale that crosses genres and defies expectations.
"Steeped in the early history of Texas's statehood and laced with eerie portents of supernatural horror. . . . Wexler keeps his twisty plot refreshingly unpredictable and endows his characters--even the non-talking skullheads--with vividly realized personalities that enliven his surreal, atmospheric tale. This weird western packs a wallop." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This philosophical Jewish-Texan retro-neo-noir--at once detective story, western, and ambling picaresque--is populated by a memorable cast of schemers, toughs, and oddballs, and rendered with a keen eye and ear for detail." - J. Robert Lennon, author of Subdivision
