Gutter Road

Absolution and Redemption

By: Marc Neuffer

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

A literary historical novel

Gutter Road: Absolution and Redemption
August 1953. Fillmore, California. The men who ride out of Gutter's bar carry a war no one talks about anymore — the one still being fought in their sleep

Walter Connor came home from Europe with notches on a rifle stock, none of them for Germans. Each one marks a man he couldn't save. He found his platoon again in the Road Dogs — a motorcycle club of veterans who couldn't fit back into the suburbs, the jobs, the neat rows of look-alike houses. It isn't a perfect life, but it's a life.
Then Stamper comes home from Modesto with bruised knuckles and a wad of cash he won't explain. And everything that followed was inevitable.

When Stamper is beaten half to death, his patches taken as trophies, and Gutter's burns to the ground with Stamper's body inside, Connor is left holding two choices: road justice, or something harder. An FBI agent named Thomas Gentry — a man with his own war and his own secrets — is working the same case from the other direction, pulling at threads connecting the motorcycle clubs to the mob, to murdered women, to heroin moving up the coast.

Gutter Road moves between the killing fields of Aachen and the Ardennes and the dust of postwar California, building toward a question every combat veteran faces eventually: after everything you've done to survive, what does it mean to choose not to?

For Connor, the answer is a silenced rifle, a rooftop, and a man who deserves to die.