Four Day Shoot (Paperback)

Crockett, Texas is the kind of small, sun-baked, insular, backwater town where nothing changes, where Main Street looks much like it did 40 years ago. Everybody knows everybody else, there's so little to do that one of the biggest pastimes is, as one town wag says, "mindin' everybody else's business," and where somebody always has the town's preacher over to dinner on Sunday. But one hot summer day, everything in this unchanging town begins to change when the local Methodist minister, Owen Dawson, shows up in a downtown saloon toting a video camera and talking about making a movie about his life; a movie which, as he describes it, people consider to be a "dirty" movie. By nightfall, Owen's movie has become a media punchline and attracted the attention of L.A. tabloid reporter Rita Scott. And if that's not enough of an eyebrow-raiser, Dawson's wife is missing, her abandoned car found tucked behind a convenience store outside of town. It all falls on the head of local police chief Clyde Thomas, commanded by a raging mayor to keep Crockett from becoming a state-wide dirty joke, led by his own curiosity into what's behind Dawson's odd behavior and his wife's disappearance, and pushed by his battered sense of decency to make it all come out right.