Goodnight, Texas Book

The town of Goodnight by the Sea lies on a peninsula between two bays, Red Moon and Humosa, and for years its people have struggled to get by, profiting on its shrimping industry, making a few bucks from tourism, especially as a winter retreat for visitors from the Great Lakes. All that is about to change. The shrimping industry is in a slump. The off-shore oil fields are played out. Global warming is causing the sea levels to rise, putting the vacation homes and condos at risk of catastrophic storms. When Gabriel Perez, a local shrimper, gets laid off, he looks for someone to blame. The rich tourists are an easy target for his job woes, but that's not his only problem: He also manages to lose his girlfriend, Una Vu, a Vietnamese-American waitress, who is disgusted with both the smallness of her life and Gabriel's petty anger. Gabriel blames Falk Powell, a teenage co-worker of Una's, for stealing her heart.

Meanwhile Falk gets credit for discovering and photographing a giant fish beached on the shore, a huge creature that has swallowed a horse. Falk's employer, the Russian émigré and entrepeneur Gusef Smurov, has the giant fish taxidermied and mounted on the roof of his restaurant, The Black Tooth Café, and makes it into a tourist attraction. But before he can enjoy its benefits, a devastating hurricane hits Goodnight. A storm surge swamps the coastline, catching many off-guard. By the end, Gabriel has his vengeance, but the people of Goodnight are not defeated.

Publishers Weekly

Goodnight by the Sea, Tex. (not to be confused with Goodnight in the Plains, 600 miles away), is a dying gulf coast town where global warming and international trade have made the once-reliable vocation of shrimping unprofitable. Alligators run amok while the West Nile virus picks off the elderly. When Russian restaurant owner Gusef learns a gigantic and thought-to-be-extinct zebra fish has beached itself nearby (replete with a dead horse in its belly), he dispatches his good-natured juvenile delinquent fry cook Falk to photograph it. As Gusef concocts schemes to capitalize on the dead fish, a hurricane brews in the gulf, portending possible doom for the town. The characters aren't particularly unique, but Cobb manages to breathe tragicomic life into them: Una, Falk's co-worker who wants more than Goodnight has to offer; Falk's adolescent cousin Leesha, who falls for Una's ex-boyfriend, Gabriel, the drunken bad boy turned driver's-ed instructor who in turn has it in for Falk. Though Cobb (The Fire Eaters) sometimes strives too hard for colloquial legitimacy ("nowadays you'd be lucky to catch a gafftop catfish a pound"), he expertly exploits the claustrophobic and incestuous atmosphere of smalltown Texas. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.