The Silverberg Business: a novel

In 1888 in Victoria, Texas, for a simple job, a Chicago private eye gets caught up in the poker game to end all poker games.
Shannon, a Chicago private detective, returns home to Galveston, Texas for a wedding. Galveston’s new rabbi asks Shannon to find Nathan Silverberg, gone missing along with a group of swindlers who claim to be soliciting money for a future colony of Romanian Jewish refugees.\nWhat seems to be a simple job soon pushes Shannon into stranger territory. His investigations lead him to a malevolent white-haired gambler, monstrous sand dune totems, and a group of skull-headed poker players trapped in an endless loop of cards and alcohol, who may be his only means to survive the business.\nWith The Silverberg Business, Robert Freeman Wexler has delivered a gloriously strange hard-boiled tale that crosses genres and defies expectations.