Join us for a reception to celebrate the launch of Car Tag---the newest novel written by acclaimed Nevada author H. Lee Barnes. Barnes will give a short reading followed by Q&A and book signing.

About the Book: Nevada has long been the backdrop for heartbreak and broken dreams for those who live there and who pass through. H. Lee Barnes' novel Car Tag shows that it doesn't matter where-Las Vegas, the desert on the outskirts of Beatty, or death row in a Nevada State Prison-every part of the state offers unique traps and temptations for those susceptible. He shows these classic Nevada literary themes through the lives and trials of the Debecki brothers, Drew and Billy, and their half brother Alex, as they struggle to keep their cracked and broken lives together. Growing up, they had plenty going against them: poverty, abuse, neglect, and a step father who was as immature as they were artificially mature. To survive, the boys engaged in petty theft and petty lies, violent self-preservation, and the reckless, wild spirits of youth coming of age. To make sense of their world, they had each other, and they had Car Tag, a game they created to prove that they were men. Like many brothers they grew apart as they grew older. Alex drifted away early from the brothers that never really accepted him. Billy, never breaking from his wild and violent past, spent much of his adult life on death row for killing a rural police officer. Only Drew, a successful police officer in Las Vegas, seems able to care enough to fight for his brother's life, and more importantly, to bring the brothers back together. Through their various trials, literal and figurative, they learn that no matter how far they had grown apart, no matter how desperate their situations had become, they always had Car Tag, a game that was all the only way they could explain the heartbreak and broken dreams of their lives.

About the author: H. Lee Barnes lives and writes in Las Vegas, where he teaches English and creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada. In his past lives, he was a soldier, a deputy sheriff, a narcotics agent, a casino dealer, and a martial arts instructor. His short stories have won the Willamette and the Arizona Authors Association fiction awards. Gunning for Ho, his first collection of short stories, was a finalist for the Stephen Turner First Fiction Award offered by the Texas Institute of Letters. In 2009 he was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. 

The turn of the wheel: The many lives of writer H. Lee Barnes