Cage Five Is Going to Break

3.6/5 ( ratings)

His name was Stacy Tate, and he'd left a string of forty robberies around the country and had been convicted on only four of them, which had been enough to put him in Murphy Farm. Stacy was a solid-looking man, as hard and as tough as any man the steel-mill slums of Pittsburgh had ever put on thepistol circuit. He had the fight-scarred hands and snake-quick temper to prove it, and he'd had to prove it a few times during his first year at Murphy. That, plus his ability to keep his guts intact, had made him cage boss. A Yankee cage boss in a Southern pris- on. A prison that hadn't much going for it— cockroaches, bean fields, shotgunguards, and the "Smith & Wesson Line." And Captain Hans Hartmann and his Hundred—who were as tough as Stacy or tougher. In spite of which, Stacy had made a plan... a plan that would, he hoped, get him out of Murphy Farm. Him and his five cell mates. He supposed that if everything worked right, absolutely right, all six of them might make it. But that was a pretty big "if" to be tossing around.

E. RICHARD JOHNSON, whose earlier novels have won him the respect of critics and the growing interest of readers across the country , has written a rough, exciting novel which pulls the reader into and along with it— and which might just shake up a few people and places in our Southern prison system.