The Bitter Half "opens in 1935 in Pearce, Arizona, where Chris Pollard, a famed if eccentric authority on jail breaks, has been called in to investigate the case of The Kid, an inmate who has broken out of every prison in which he has been held. The Kid appears and disappears, eluding his pursuers, while at Pollard's Wisconsin estate a rag-tag group of travelers and refugees come together, including a black family from Florida, a female candy store owner known as Bo Peep, and a troupe of down-and-out entertainers. As Pollard and The Kid traverse the wasteland of Depression-era America, an obsessive, evasive, and erotic attraction grows between the two, culminating in a final confrontation at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. In revealing their tangled attraction and intertwined fates, "The Bitter Half" offers a striptease of masks and mysteries, slowly revealing a web of seductions, assumptions, and miscues of desire. Praise for Toby Olson's fiction:
"The Bitter Half "opens in 1935 in Pearce, Arizona, where Chris Pollard, a famed if eccentric authority on jail breaks, has been called in to investigate the case of The Kid, an inmate who has broken out of every prison in which he has been held. The Kid appears and disappears, eluding his pursuers, while at Pollard's Wisconsin estate a rag-tag group of travelers and refugees come together, including a black family from Florida, a female candy store owner known as Bo Peep, and a troupe of down-and-out entertainers. As Pollard and The Kid traverse the wasteland of Depression-era America, an obsessive, evasive, and erotic attraction grows between the two, culminating in a final confrontation at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. In revealing their tangled attraction and intertwined fates, "The Bitter Half" offers a striptease of masks and mysteries, slowly revealing a web of seductions, assumptions, and miscues of desire. Praise for Toby Olson's fiction: