An unlucky grad student just got himself killed in a robbery gone bad. And as lowly drug lieutenant Harold Jenks races with the killer out of the alley, a light goes off in his head: He'll steal the dead kid's identity. Now Jenks, who once lorded it over seven square blocks in East St. Louis, is headed due west. With a .32 in his pocket, a 9mm Glock taped across his back, and a rap sheet nearly as long as Finnegans Wake, he's cruising the halls of academia as Eastern Oklahoma U's newest grad student, looking for action and hoping he can stay one couplet ahead of his violent past.

Across campus visiting professor Jay Morgan has a more pressing problem: What to do about the dead coed in his bed. The Professor's no killer, but try telling that to private eye Deke Stubbs. Then more trouble blows into town as St. Louis drug boss Red Zach and his minions converge on Fumbee, Oklahoma, looking for a consignment of missing cocaine... For Morgan and Jenks, now desperate fugitives from poetic justice, survival means learning new skills - and learning fast. Because if they find out they're bottom-of-the-class, that means they're already dead.

Featuring the sleaziest, sorriest, and most captivating group of criminal lowlifes, sexed-up academics, poets, and rappers ever to collide in one crime novel, The Pistol Poets speeds deliriously to its electrifying payoff.