Third and Indiana: A Novel

In the Philadelphia neighborhood known as the Badlands, drug gangs rule absolutely. Each time a life is lost in the carnage of the local drug wars, a boldly drawn chalk outline of a body appears on the street leading up to City hall: a teenaged dealer, a priest, a little girl with a jump rope. Ofelia Santoro rides her bicycle through the dark, decaying streets, looking for her fourteen-year-old-son, Gabriel. She's afraid of what she might find. Gabriel has fallen in with the most savage of the drug dealers, but now wants to get out - if he can. In this gritty, fast-moving novel, acclaimed Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Steve Lopez brings home the violence that is scarring America's vast urban wastelands, and the humanity that might save them. . "An unfancy prose is streaked by strong, cinematic images . . . Lopez aims to prick consciences, in the tradition of the documentary novelist, and he does so with considerable style." - The Daily Telegraph "Lopez has done what Balzac, Dickens . . . and Dostoevsky did so masterfully: he has taken a torch to the back of the cave and returned to tell us what he has seen." -Pete Hamill, The Philadelphia Inquirer