Most coming-of-age stories don’t feature dead bodies, point-blank murder, duffel bags stuffed with weed, bent cops, bloody biker shootouts or underage rich kids popping Molly to the zombie beat of skull-crushing club music.

Then again, author Joe Clifford isn’t telling a sugary, rose-tinted tale of Billy and Buffy’s first taste of lust in his relentlessly grungy novel, Skunk Train.

Instead, Clifford wraps the hard-boiled blooming of teenager Kyle Gill in a noir-steeped story of losers and low-lifes scamming, stealing and hustling their way through hellscapes of dead-end rural desperation in northern California and suburban squalor on the edges of San Francisco and Los Angeles. This bleakness is leavened by the occasional peek at manicured enclaves where privilege is considered a birthright.

A classic noir dynamic is also in play — losers grabbing for the brass ring of a crime caper to escape their desolate circumstances, a reach that often ends in death and disaster. In this case, the MacGuffin is those duffel bags of dope and an associated backpack stuffed with cash.

The dope presumably belongs to a Mexican cartel. And it’s a grim windfall for Deke and Jimmy, two low-level dealers who discover the bloody bodies of their main supplier, Bodhi, and his two young wives in their mobile home, along with the duffel bags and a cache of assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols they also grab.

Deke and Jimmy know they’re on a very lethal clock, figuring they only have a few hours to cut a deal to convert the dope to cash before cartel sicarios track them down. But they live in Dormundt, a sad little burg in Humboldt County, the heart of California dope country, where everybody is either growing, selling or smoking the primo chronic. A connection who can broker a deal for the weight they’re carrying is hard to come by.

Jimmy winds up calling a fellow low-life “who knows a guy.” They set the meet for oh-dark-thirty at the Skunk Train Motor Inn, a forlorn waystation where hope never checks in. It’s a trap. The buyers are cops, but their takedown of Deke and Jimmy is interrupted by a biker gang that roars up and starts blasting.

Deke and Jimmy split up and beat feet. But not before Deke grabs the cops’ backpack of cash and tosses it in the bed of Jimmy’s truck. Now he’s desperate to get back to the motel room where his half-brother Kyle is waiting, wide-eyed and staring out the window at the firefight. But the route he takes skirts the edge of the highway out front and he gets crushed by a hurtling tractor-trailer rig.

Kyle is all alone. The firefight is over. The cops are gone. With the dope. He creeps past the bodies of two bikers he knows from selling them dope at their favorite bar. He finds the keys to Jimmy’s truck and drives away, heading south.

The book becomes Kyle’s story now, a tale of a youngster forced to grow up fast, with bent cops and cartel killers on his tail and a backpack full of cash. He’s focused on finding the father who abandoned him, a movie producer in Hollywood.

Or so he’s been told. He also believes Deke was his cousin, not his half-brother. Kyle’s journey reveals the difference between hard truths and wishful fantasy. And the power of ditching the dreamy lie and owning what’s real, shouldering the pain and soldiering on.

The road also takes him to Lizzie Decker, a smart and gorgeous rich girl who hits the clubs of San Francisco, takes a shine to Kyle, helps him get the money back from Jimmy and drives him to L.A., the final leg of his quest to either find his father or the rocky truth.

There’s a glimmer of connection between Lizzie and Kyle, despite the class differences and the slight difference in age. But there are bad dudes after Kyle and the money — even Jimmy is an enemy now.

You find yourself rooting for Kyle — and Lizzie — hoping both will outrun the killers and crooked cops, shake free of the bullets, blood and loss, and maybe, just maybe, find each other at the end of this road.

Skunk Train, By Joe Clifford, Square Tire Books, Austin, TX, @ 2025, available in paperback and Kindle HERE.

Jim Nesbitt is the award-winning author of five hard-boiled Texas crime thrillers set in the desert outback of West Texas and northern Mexico and featuring a battered but relentless shamus and ex-homicide detective named Ed Earl Burch. Learn more HERE.