Sometimes You Get the Bear
by Dan Holly
Sometimes You Get the Bear is a novel that has action, suspense and drama -- all built around a moral: Attitude is everything. The plot involves two brothers who learn a lot about themselves and about life over a two-year period. Steve Holland, college dropout and drug addict, finds himself in his most serious jam ever when he accidentally kills a Columbia University student during a fight over a woman. Steve feels the victim provoked him, but he weighs the odds against a sympathetic judicial system and comes up with this: He's a black man with a criminal record, and the victim was white and the son of a prominent New Yorker.
Steve flees New York City, convinced he's going to jail for a long time. Steve decides he at least deserves a few days to lay on a California beach and think. He concludes that he cannot go to jail without ever having achieved anything meaningful, nor never having found true love. Despite two close calls, Steve stays one step ahead of the FBI. He drifts to Detroit, where he begins to turn his life around. Using an assumed identity, Steve becomes a community leader in a struggling neighborhood. He gains more and more to lose as the FBI draws its net tighter and tighter around him.
Chris Holland has done all the right things in life and has never had to deal with any crises -- until he speaks freely about his brother to a newspaper reporter in a conversation he thinks is off the record. The comments are published and Chris' supervisors at the New Jersey state agency where he works feel he has tarnished the agency's name by defending a murderer. He is fired. But Chris' bad luck is just beginning. He takes a job for which he is overqualified, then loses that, too. He suffers through a series of menial jobs, then loses his girlfriend.
Drinking too much, too proud to ask for help and too bitter to simply get on with his life, Chris continues to drift downward. He ends up homeless on the streets of South Florida. The streets prove a little meaner than Chris had anticipated, and it begins to look like disaster may find him before his family does.
To read excerpts and find out more about the book, visit August Press. To contact the author click here.
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