Double Acting

Mike Carver, an African-American boy of 13, raised by his novel writing dad in the nice suburban environment of Thousand Oaks, California, is dismayed when his father's dwindling income forces a move to a tumbledown shack in the seemingly desolate sweltering desert of Coyote Valley, Arizona. The property, such as it is -- electricity unreliable, and only a windmill for water -- was bequeathed to Mike's dad by Mike's great-uncle, who died at the age of 107 after spending most of his life searching for a ton of gold bars stolen in a train robbery in 1897 and reputedly still buried somewhere near the robbery site. Except for its rusty narrow-gauge track, the Coyote Valley And Codyville railroad, abandoned in 1917, has almost been forgotten, along with the ghost town of Codyville somewhere up in the mountains. But Mike, though having an interest in steam trains, is much more concerned upon his arrival to find there's only dial-up web service, along with only two TV channels. Even worse from Mike's perspective, the only two boys within twenty miles are Scooter, 12, a blond-haired "out-of-shape gamer" and smut-minded randy smart-ass, whose mom works at a saloon in town; and Little Coyote, 13, an incredibly fat Apache boy who lives in a shack no better than Mike's at what had once been a water stop on the abandoned railroad, and whose sister cooks in a cafe. Mike, a budding heath-nut and obsessive body-builder, isn't sure he wants to befriend either boy. But, as the story unfolds, revealing desert legend and lore, many old wild west characters -- two-legged, four-legged, and some of them ghosts -- an adventure in a haunted mine, a steam locomotive resurrected, and a hundred-year-old mystery solved, Mike learns that true friends come in all shapes and sizes, and souls aren't judged by BMI, fleeting physical handsomeness, or how much wealth one accumulates while breathing the air of this earth.