The Blurb:

Cataract City is a tourist town with an uncanny hold over those born within its borders, a place with more to it than first meets the eye: behind the gaudy storefronts and sidewalk vendors, past the hawkers of tourist T-shirts and souvenirs, are the townspeople who toil at the Bisk, the local cookie factory. And beneath that crumbling facade are the truly desperate: those drawn to gritty alleyways on both sides of the US-Canada border, inhabitants of a shadow world fulled by money exchanged over dog races, bare-knuckle brawls, and nighttime smuggling.

This was some powerful writing! The book itself features a lot of violence, some very disturbing, but it's never entirely hopeless.

Left in the LFL at 422 Redden.