Excerpt from The Marauders by Tom Cooper, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Wes's father flicked his cigarette into the bushes and they stepped onto the dock. In the harbor parking lot a few folding tables were set up with crockpots of gumbo, paper plates, plastic spoons. Transistor radios droned in competition, one playing a pop station out of New Orleans, another an AM talk show out of Baton Rouge. A big-bellied old woman was boiling crabs in a gas-lit kettle. A hunchbacked man fingered the mother-of- pearl buttons of his wheezing accordion. Another man scraped his vest frottoir with rusty spoons.

Wes had known these faces his whole life. They were captains and crewmen, crabbers and trappers. In May they shrimped for pinks and in August for whites. In the fall some of them went after alligators and oysters. And they were the sons and daughters of captains and crewmembers, still too young to help on the boats. The heavyset wives with harried faces and graying hair. The grandmothers and grandfathers with rueful eyes and worried toothless jaws.

"Hey, Bobby," a man said to Wes's father. He had on yellow waders and pulled a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket and tapped the bottom with his gnarled forefinger. He lipped the cigarette.

"Where the hell you been, Davey?" Wes's father said.

"Daytona," Davey said. "Workin' on one of those charter boats for a bunch of rich Florida fucks."

A few years ago Davey had worked for Wes's father, but he quit and joined the crew of a bigger boat when the hauls got smaller and smaller and when the price of shrimp went down. A bigger boat meant a bigger paycheck. Wes's father didn't begrudge him the fact. He knew how hard it was scraping by in the Barataria and probably would have done the same.

"You like it over there?" Wes's father asked.

"Yeah, it was paradise," Davey said. He lit his cigarette and scrunched one side of his face against the smoke. "Just about gave all this up," he said, gesturing across the bayou at the boats shambling out of the harbor, at the bent trees brooding over the water.

At the end of the dock a bare-chested little boy pissed gleefully into the bayou. When he finished he zipped up his camouflage shorts and hopped barefoot like a monkey back to his mother. Wes was about this boy's age when he started coming out here to the harbor. Young enough to remember the air of festivity that once presided over these first nights of the shrimping season. The fais-do- dos, the Cajun dances. Those were better times for everyone in the Barataria. Before the bayou started grubbing out smaller and smaller hauls of shrimp. Before the oil spill. Before Katrina.

Before Wes's mother died.

"Any word yet?" Wes's father asked.

"Couple of guys already radioed in," Davey said. "Shrimp look thin. Early yet, though."

"Oil?"

"Everywhere."

Davey looked at Wes. "How you doin', podnah? Thought you'd'a gone Ivy League on us by now."

Wes forced a grin and shook his head. College, he already knew, was pretty much out of the question.

"Boy, is that gray in your hair already?" Davey said.

"A bit, yes sir," Wes said. Just after his sixteenth birthday, the gray had begun to pepper the sides of his head. A little at first, but every time he got his hair cut there were several new grays and Wes guessed he'd be as white-haired as his father before he turned thirty.

"You two come on over to the house for supper when all this dies down, huh?" Davey said.

"We will, Davey," Wes's father said. "You say hello to Kelly and Renee now."

"Shuh, shuh."

Wes followed his father down the dock to their boat and hopped onto the deck and untied the ropes from the dock cleats. He heard someone step behind him and turned. It was Father Neely in his cassock and alb, the sweat on his forehead gleaming in the dock lights.

"How you, Father," Wes said. He stood and shook the man's hand. Soft and damp. Never a day of boat work in his life.

Excerpted from The Marauders by Tom Cooper. Copyright © 2015 by Tom Cooper. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.