The Catch

No one knows the seductive world of addiction better than Kim Wozencraft. In her first novel, Rush, she created an unforgettable heroine, a cop pulled undercover, who risked her life and career when the lines of justice began to blur.

Now, in The Catch, she revisits that world — only this time she is writing from the other side of the law.

Living like a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde, Kurt and Annie have been smuggling enormous quantities of marijuana for years. But now they've put down roots in upstate New York and started a family. Annie wants to go straight. When Kurt, promising to make this trip his last, attracts the attention of the DEA, he finds himself facing life imprisonment. He goes on the lam, leaving Annie vulnerable and a prime target for Special Agent Joseph Kessler, who sees her as both the bait to trap Kurt and as the object of his love.

Wozencraft's clean, spare prose and psychological acuity combine to create remarkable portraits of a women desperate to keep her family together and of the man she loves, whose addiction to danger threatens their very existence. In Annie, Wozencraft has created a woman whose devotion to her husband is matched only by her love for their children and the desire to protect their innocence. Her choices become few and achingly real as this taut and compelling novel, set against the high-stakes world of international drug smuggling, races toward its harrowing conclusion.

   

   

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"The Catch is the best novel I've read about drug smugglers and narcs. Exciting in the turns of its plot, acute in its characterization, subtle in its sense of loss for the men and women who are caught up in the action on both sides of the law, Kim Wozencraft's writing cuts so completely through the harsh and one-dimensional stereotypes usually attached to this subject, that the final effect is not only complex but overpowering. Add to this good news one more rarity: the book has a love story that is not only moving but believable."

— Norman Mailer

   

"Ms. Wozencraft has a strong, almost androgynous sensitivity to the criminal mind that engrossed me throughout. As a novelist, she is developing into one of the finest crime writers around, and one day soon, may surpass all our expectations."

— Oliver Stone

   

"Kim Wozencraft is destined for, and deserves, acclaim and audience. Ex-cop, ex-junkie, ex-convict, she understand the cracks in society and the tangles of the individual — and of equal or greater significance, she writes like a dream, her prose frequently showing the musical rhythms of poetry. Her characters come to life; she catches the universal in the individual, and the reader can see the world through their eyes. And the whole thing crackles with human drama."

— Edward Bunker