Cicero Grimes is a psychiatrist who has given up a luminous career to throw himself body and soul into recuperating drug addicts in one of the most infamous neighbourhoods of Bad City, New Orleans. Luther Grimes, nicknamed Tough Bullet, is his brother. An ex legend of the Special Corps and a Vietnam veteran where he distinguished himself for bravery and craziness, he pushes drugs and sells his services to whoever pays most in his base in Latin America.Cicero hates Luther, a ferocious, absolute hatred that has carved a deep hole in his heart. Something happened in their past, something that Clarence Jefferson, a corrupt, sadistic police captain, wants to know at any cost. And then there’s Cicero’s patient Callie, an ex-prostitute hooked on drugs, apparently repentant, but who has helped Luther to rob the bank of her husband, Reverend Cleveland Carter, and is now escaping with a million dollars. The loot whets the appetite of too many people and becomes the short fuse for an explosion of violence that overwhelms all the actors in this drama. Still, maybe each one of them would be willing to exchange that ocean of money with a scrap of truth, a minute of peace, a flight from the abysmal solitude of Bad City. Before finding themselves face to face with their demons. Set some years before Katrina, Bad City is already like a post-bomb city, a stone desert where only predators move while the inhabitants of the city live barricaded in their houses for fear of losing the little or much they have. It is in this Apocalypse that Tim Willocks has set a raw, extreme thriller, a grand new chapter in the tradition of the gothic novels of the American South, where under the crust of flesh and blood is the portrait of a country that has lost itself.