THE CHEATING SIDE

Investigator Jimmy Chinden is tracking a stolen 1961 Impala when he follows a column of smoke into the sagebrush to discover the vehicle - on fire, and with a body in the trunk.

The victim is a reviled swindler, who Jimmy suspects murdered his mother after bilking her out of the no-tell motel she owned. The body's discovery awakens generational demons and sets off a chain of dark events as Jimmy's theft case turns into a murder investigation, threatening to upend a land deal worth millions and putting Jimmy's family at risk as North Idaho white supremacists and their drug cartel associates come gunning for him.

With a cast of characters evoking Elmore Leonard's society of goons, and a connection to the landscape that is vivid, visceral, and reminiscent of James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels, THE CHEATING SIDE provides a genre-pushing, socially relevant reinvigoration of the American crime novel protagonist, with a challenge to pervasive masculinity tropes and a biting, no-holds- barred attack on the bigotries of the American West.

J. Reuben Appelman is author of While Idaho Slept: The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students (Harper), and the acclaimed true-crime memoir, The Kill Jar (Gallery/Simon & Schuster), among the first of the true-crime memoir genre. The Kill Jar inspired the popular Hulu docuseries, "Children of the Snow" (2020), and was called one of the best true-crime books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Elle, Oxygen, Bustle, Crime Reads, and the USA Today network of newspapers. Appelman spent ten years working as a private investigator in the states of Montana, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, and his home base in Boise, Idaho.