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Buzzards Bay. November 1980. The commercial fishing vessel Padre Pio motors back to New Bedford with a haul of marijuana after a nighttime rendezvous with a drug freighter. Below deck hard-luck fisherman Duchand wakes before dawn. João, the ship’s devout Cape Verdean owner and captain, is missing, “gone over.” Duchand’s fellow crew members are not talking. And two men from the freighter are back on board wielding AK-47s. One of them is Berg, amateur theologian, absolute sociopath, and Duchand’s childhood friend. Missing for decades, Berg has resurfaced as liaison for suppliers seeking retail outlets along the East Coast. He’s frantic to find João’s rumored “ledger”— an illustrated chronicle of illegal activity along New Bedford’s seedy waterfront—and he’s wrongly convinced Duchand, for whom Joao has served surrogate father and spiritual guide, knows where it is. Duchand jumps ship. Armed now with João’s antique 9mm, a vial of amphetamines, and two sets of ancient rosaries, he plunges headlong into the moribund precincts of 1980s New Bedford in search of João’s ledger, a landscape of doomed informants, well-armed parish priests, and terminally ill saints-in-waiting—a journey that will lead to revelation and bloody apotheosis back out at sea.
“Part crime novel, part theological investigation, Pete Duval’s brilliant and riveting Night Work reads like some lost Melville story, dug out of an attic trunk and updated for the seedy harbors of New England in the 1980s. Both a haunting and an act of grace, this is a novel of incredible power.”
—Mark Powell, author of Hurricane Season and The Late Rebellion
“Night Work is a speed-fueled fever dream of a novel, a breakneck thriller with the soul of a gothic ghost tale. Told in exuberant prose, it is a story that will haunt you long after you’ve read its final pages.”
—C. Matthew Smith, author of Twentymile
“Pete Duval stretches reality like a rubber band. And never lets it break. Night Work is a fascinating work that finds a home somewhere between the mirages of Heart of Darkness and the illusions of Angel Heart. It’s beautifully written, haunting, poetic, with all senses tingling. It’s also an edge-of-your-seat thriller with a main character that taunts the reader with his closeness and yet remains a teasing ‘other’. A strange book unlike anything current crime literature has to offer. A true gift.”
—M.E. Proctor, author of Love You Till Tuesday
“Night Work is a contemplative thriller that leads the reader to the haunted edge along with its lead character Duchand. Pete Duval crafts an unrelenting story through a landscape of dark choices that will leave you with lingering ghosts.”
—Rob D. Smith, author of Good-looking Ugly
Pete Duval is the author of two award-winning collections of short fiction. Rear View (Mariner, 2004), which won the Bakeless Prize, the Connecticut Book Award, and was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times book award; and The Deposition (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021) winner of the 2020 Juniper Prize for Fiction. The recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf and the Collegeville Institute, Pete teaches at West Chester University in Pennsylvania and lives in Jersey City, NJ, with his wife and daughter, and five cats.
