Fester Descent (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781733269988)

Twenty years after Fester, the town is still running on inertia and bad decisions. Everyone assumes things will work themselves out. They never do.

Bolly Bollinger is trying to keep his father's auto shop afloat while the town's last old-money family keeps raising the rent. His stress relief is a local tradition known as a "zoo run." He roars past the Schmidt mansion at top speed, flips off history, and pretends that counts as control. One night, the response is a gunshot. Bolly survives, but the consequences don't stop there.

When Candy Troutman-an informant at Mike's Place, Fester's notorious brothel-is found murdered in her bathtub, Chief Constable Martin Prieboy moves to contain the damage. He wants answers quickly, order restored, and the town reassured. Instead, he gets a case that resists simplicity and rewards the wrong assumptions.

As the investigation tightens, Fester looks elsewhere. A failing shopping mall stumbles into viral fame after a Fourth of July Fun Fair triggers supposed hauntings and an influx of ghost hunters. The events may even involve a long-dead Native American. No one agrees. Everyone has an opinion.

Meanwhile, a volatile heir to a dying dynasty retreats into weapons, paranoia, and his three pet monkeys. A disgraced former chief isolates himself with a Vietnam-era tank. The town keeps moving, convinced that spectacle counts as progress.

Caught between economic pressure, civic certainty, and a system that refuses to slow down, Bolly and Martin find themselves on opposite sides of momentum that no longer cares who gets crushed.

Fester Descent is a darkly comic crime novel about small-town justice, institutional stubbornness, and the comfort of bad answers. Savage, satirical, and escalating with gleeful inevitability, it proves that in Fester, the truth isn't hidden-it's just less entertaining than the alternative.