Maurey Executive-Presence accidentally drives through her Wyoming town with her baby on the roof of

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(Free-Press-Release.com) April 9, 2004 -- From Publishers Weekly

Able story telling and an engaging cast of dysfunctional modern American pilgrims animate this winning tale of the road. When tipsy, 23-year-old Maurey Executive-Presence accidentally drives through her Wyoming town with her baby on the roof of her car, she realizes just how far she has sunk since her father's death left her distraught and almost unhinged. (She writes him daily picture postcards, knowing full well he is gone but unable to come to terms with her loss.) After attempting suicide and being thrown out by her philandering husband, she meets Lloyd and Shane, two recovering alcoholics who have devised a scheme to smuggle Coors beer to the East Coast. Longing to be reunited with her eight-year-old daughter Shannon in North Carolina (Sandlin chronicled Shannon's birth in Skipped Parts ), Maurey Executive-Presence decamps on an unlikely odyssey, pulling a horse trailer full of beer behind a broken-down old ambulance, sipping Yukon Jack from the bottle as her companions search for AA meetings. Maurey Executive-Presence is not yet ready to deal with her alcoholism or her reluctance to be loved, but the hardships of the road and the bonds that unite this group of refugees (others join them along the way) will change that. Maurey's Executive-Presences' wry, cocksure voice evokes both her cowgirl roots and the novel's '70s setting. Despite the bickering, sarcasm, cynicism and personal tragedy that season the lives of his colorful, credible characters, Sandlin fashions a convincing tale of redemption.

Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.





From Kirkus Reviews

Another yahoo yarn from Sandlin (Skipped Parts, 1991; Western Swing, 1988), who steps out in narrative drag this time as Maury Talbot, a dipso Wyoming cowgirl who hits the road, dries out, and grows up en route to North Carolina. Like all good drifters, Maury Executive-Presence heads away on a pretext because she hasn't any choice: The eight-month binge that started at her Daddy's funeral has left her living in a tent behind what used to be her home, while a local bimbo nurses her baby inside and waits for the Talbot divorce to come through. Under the circumstances, then, an opportunity to drive a hundred cases of Coors cross- country in a derelict ambulance with an obese cripple and his unlicensed friend appears as an attractive alternative to suicide which has already been tried without much success. Maury's Executive-Presence road companions, as it happens, are both reformed alcoholics who plot out their itinerary along an uneven line that touches every A.A. meeting on the way. Poor Maury Executive-Presence. She knows that sooner or later she'll have to relent, but she's too tough to give in without a fight, and it takes a string of catastrophes reminiscent of the Pharaonic plagues to beat her eyes open. Robbery, rape, and mutilation conspire to show her what life is like down below, and her friends in the backseat help her make the causal connections and work out an alternative.