G.A. Johnson's debut novel mixes spirituality and with the brutality and filth of street life and addiction.

Life after witnessing his father's murder at the hands of the Klan was a narcotic waste land that took Murphy Johnson from Neshoba County, Mississippi to Denver, Colorado. He was the man the world walked around; he held a blank cardboard sign, and his eyes were a frozen river. Nothing seemed to move on the surface, but the water was flowing beneath an expression frosted over by four-decades of drugs, alcohol, and concrete beds. Until he reemerged into consciousness under a tree in Civic Center Park.

The Shiner explores the gamut of political chasms in society. The man the world walked around becomes the man who changes the world around him. Murphy is entangled in the lives of an ensemble cast of street dwellers, suburbanites and aristocrats. Besides fighting the ghosts of his past and the desire to fall back into addiction, he fights for survival on the streets and in the world of his new employer-an escort service pimp. Villains are not what they seem and the innocent are less than so, but Murphy embraces them all with a child's love-even the man who is trying to kill him.