The Big Tow — Ann McMan

Welcome to the National Recovery Bureau, where your assets are as sacred as God's holy word.

Vera “Nick” Nicholson is an overtaxed and underpaid attorney wasting away on the bottom rung of the gilded ladder at Turner, Witherspoon, Anders, and Tyler in Winston-Salem, NC. When a high-priced luxury car belonging to one of the firm's top clients goes missing, Nick gets saddled with the unenviable job of recovering the vehicle―and its mysterious contents―without involving the cops. Enter Fast Eddie and his quirky band of misfits at The National Recovery Bureau, a repo agency located in a sleepy town called K-Vegas.

When Nick is unceremoniously furloughed from T**T, she throws caution to the wind and signs on to become the newest agent of the NRB, teaming up with moonlighting third-grade schoolteacher, Frances “Frankie” Stohler. Frankie's mortician father and beautician mother are stalwarts of the Winston-Salem community―so it's no surprise that everyone across three counties has some connection to her family. What is surprising, however, is the Slim Jim Frankie carries in her purse and her preternatural talent for jacking cars.

Nick and Frankie's stumbling entrée into the surreal world of asset recovery takes them on a hilarious, fast-paced, and mind-bending journey across the back roads and byways of the Tar Heel state, setting into motion a chain of misadventures that lead them both toward financial independence, cataclysmic legal jeopardy, and the discovery that true love can sometimes lurk in the most unlikely places.

"Repo romance might not be a genre, but two-time Lambda Literary Award-winner McMan makes a case that it should be with this delicious and hilarious fever-dream of a novel." -- Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)