Ring On Deli

A novel about supermarkets and democracy.Brothers Ray and Patrick Markham live in Pennacook, Massachusetts, a despairing former mill town plagued by feral boars. It's the type of place where streets are named for scoundrel governors and lesser Monopoly properties, where even Dr. Chong, the high-school principal, can't bear to mingle with the locals in her free time.Ray serves as Patrick's legal guardian. He spends his days on the Bounty Bag deli line, making a mean meatball sandwich, critiquing Muscles Carbonara's obscenely suggestive deal flyers, and studiously ducking any thought of his future. But Ray's tick-like comfort in the static here and now is wildly disrupted when Patrick runs away and a greedy board of directors fires Angie Martini, Bounty Bag's great-hearted CEO, turning Bounty Bag upside down with worker protests.Dr. Chong has troubles of her own. She's on a longshot campaign for a tax-cap override to fund a less-carcinogenic building for Andrew Johnson Memorial High School. But as Election Day nears, the meltdown at Bounty Bag threatens to gut her already shoestring tax base.Patrick, meanwhile, has fallen into a scam targeting Ray's own deli. Things look bleak-until he lucks into the classroom of the dying Mr. Grant, whose demanding history class gets him thinking more deeply, about Pennacook, Bounty Bag, and his own past and future.