Book excerpt: A hard-luck youth triumphs over the calamities he has brought to those who sheltered him. Jinks is a story told in the haunting blue-collar voice of an amiable innocent. Orphaned and itinerant, he seeks a place of safety among society's outcasts in the cities and forests of his nation, seeming always to walk the line between crisis and deliverance. After an event in which he swings the axe in a tragic accident, he flees from the snowy logging camps of the northwest to the somnolence of the Everglades. Now small calamities trail him: machines break down, healthy people fall ill, good fortune fails, all best laid plans are scrambled. One such catastrophe draws him into the reach of a powerful woman and her accomplice who entangle him in a murderous scheme, but the misfortune he brings everywhere with him now punishes these plotters. Unexpectedly, the events that free him also lead to the salvation of an entire town that nurtured him in darker days. Gently comic and wise, Jinks is a joyous tale of one man's dogged spirit, and of moral justice that celebrates the bright promise of human goodwill.