The New Desperados

MADE IN AMERICA, BROKEN IN AMERICA

Charlie Poore didn’t set out to become an outlaw. He was just a working-class guy from Ontario, California, grieving his mother, trying to understand his father, and following the older brother he had worshipped his whole life.

Smiley Poore was fearless, funny, reckless, magnetic, and impossible to ignore. He could talk a room into cheering, a brother into following, and himself into believing he was chosen for something bigger. After their mother dies, their factory closes, and their father is killed in the chaos that follows, Smiley turns his rage into a cause.

He calls it justice. He calls it the Second American Revolution. Charlie wants to believe him.

But what begins as grief and working-class anger becomes something darker. Smiley’s ego grows into a kind of religion of its own, and Charlie follows him deeper and deeper into bad choices, violence, guilt, and spiritual blindness.

Then Charlie meets Magdalena. She has her own past, her own wounds, and a faith Charlie doesn’t understand. Through Magdalena, Charlie begins to see the difference between justice and revenge, loyalty and surrender, brotherhood and idolatry, darkness and grace.

The New Desperados is a gritty, emotional novel about brothers, grief, faith, ego, working-class loss, and the terrifying power of following the wrong person for the right reasons.

It is about a man who was blind. And what it took for him to finally see.