FRANK: A Novel by Joe Gibbs

Every Family has their hidden crackpot.

Uncle Frank: chronic gambler, self-proclaimed philosopher, prodigious alcoholic, and an innate con artist. Yet, Brogan knew him only for his birthday cards. They arrived every year acompanied by a $10 check that Brogan was never allowed to cash knowing full well that it would bounce. 

Two days shy of his eighteenth birthday, Brogan awakes on the morning of Thanksgiving break to find that his estranged Uncle Frank is waiting at his doorstep. Haunted by the recent suicide of his best friend, Brogan is seduced by Frank, a man he has never met, and his life of risk and abandonment. He agrees to a road trip – not sanctioned by his parents – that will take them from New Jersey to Key West, Florida.

Brogan’s future is promising. The best student in his prestigious New Jersey preparatory school, he has recently accepted a full academic scholarship to MIT. But Brogan will discover Frank’s world of misfits and mobsters, including Bogota, an enormous ex-mobster transvestite that could rip apart a freight train. Frank’s life threatens everyone around him and exposes the hardship of tangled family relationships and the lies and secrets we keep to protect others.