Picket Line and Other Stories

Three stories - the never-before-published 'Picket Line', along with 'Chick Killer' and 'Ice Man' - showing Elmore Leonard at his most terse and thrilling

'Like all of Leonard's books, Picket Line is a taut and engaging tale. Crime dramas made Leonard famous, but this is a social-justice story. . . . Leonard renders their adventures and their thoughts in spare, elegant, Hemingway-inspired prose. . . . Picket Line builds a convincing portrait of the spirit of a lost, idealistic age. . . . It has the cinematic mastery of scene and dialogue that characterized Leonard's later works' - Héctor Tobar, The New York Times

There are some lines you should never cross...

Trouble is in the air at Stanzik Farms, Texas. The workers have gone on strike and tensions are threatening to boil over. As secrets come to a head and migrant workers, cops, foremen, agitators and union bosses collide at the picket line, things start to get very rough indeed. Elmore Leonard's brilliantly orchestrated, never-before-published story Picket Line is accompanied here by two more terse tales of ruthless enforcers and tense stand-offs, riffing on the thing that made him great: his extraordinary ear for dialogue, and for creating situations where the stakes could not be higher for the loser.