Notes

262 pages Summary: Roscoe T. Martin sets his sights on a new type of power spreading at the start of the twentieth century: electricity. It becomes his training, his life's work. When his wife, Marie, inherits her father's failing farm, Roscoe has to give up his livelihood, with great cost to his sense of self, his marriage and his family. He uses his skills as an electrician to siphon energy from the state, ushering in a period of bounty and happiness. When a young man working for the state power company stumbles on Roscoe's illegal lines and is electrocuted, everything changes: Roscoe is arrested; the farm once more starts to deteriorate; and Marie abandons her husband, leaving him to face his twenty-year sentence alone. Now an unmoored Roscoe must carve out a place at Kilby Prison. Climbing the ranks of the incarcerated from dairy hand to librarian to "dog boy," an inmate who helps the guards track down escapees, he is ultimately forced to ask himself once more if his work is just that, or if the price of his crimes - for him and his family - is greater than he ever let himself believe