Renton (Small Town Smuttle #2)

After a summer in Rosetown that ended the way Gary’s summers tend to end — complicated, loud, and with a fire captain making threats on a dock at five-thirty in the morning —

Gary Ryan heads to Renton, Texas with his English Mastiff Marv, a duffel bag, and a plan arranged by his oldest friend Stu.

The plan is simple: finish the master’s degree he’s been circling for a decade, keep his head down, and stay out of trouble.

He makes it approximately one night.

What follows is a year that Gary did not see coming and could not have planned for — a cast of characters who arrive without warning and leave a mark, a family with a century of secrets buried underneath their property,

and a situation that grows considerably more complicated than his Thursday afternoons suggest.

The women of Renton arrive the same way trouble always does in Gary’s life — beautifully, unexpectedly, and with consequences he doesn’t fully appreciate until it’s too late to do anything sensible about them.

Some bring warmth. Some bring history. At least one brings danger wrapped in something considerably more appealing than danger has any right to be, and Gary, being Gary, walks straight into all of it with his eyes open and his better judgment running approximately three steps behind.

Through all of it, Gary does what Gary has always done. He figures it out. Eventually.

With Marv earning more friends in every new town than Gary manages, Stu’s Sunday dinners as his weekly fixed point, and the particular resilience of a man who has learned that the only way through a complicated situation is straight through the middle of it,

Gary Ryan discovers that Texas was exactly the chapter he needed.

Even if it nearly killed him a few times along the way.

Small Town Smuttle — Renton is the second installment in the Small Town Smuttle series. Some names have been changed. Most of the stories are exactly as ridiculous as they sound.