When New York advertising executive Adam Osborne is exiled to the Deep South, an advertising contract worth millions of dollars is up for grabs. Before long, everyone wants a piece of Adam. His partner wants to kill him, his competitor wants to bury him, the governor wants to drive the stake though his heart and, all the while, his best friend's ex-wife claims she has the inside track to nail down the contract, but that path leads across her rumpled bed. As the stakes get higher and decision day draws near, Adam finds himself falling hard for - a winsome yet unorthodox Presbyterian minister, whose quirky viewpoints include her conclusion that the Essence of Mankind hides in a bottle of ketchup. Torn between one woman dangling the keys to a fortune and another who may very well hold the road map to his wretched soul's redemption, the time is coming for Adam Osborne to make the choice of his life.
About the Author: Steven Wells Hicks came to the Deep South in pursuit of one beautiful woman, married a different one (the South is rife with them, after all), bought a gray seersucker suit and discovered the natural correlation between mid-afternoon August and cold beer. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Coe College, he failed as a sportswriter on a one-horse Nebraska daily, a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman in the tenements of Boston and dreadful actor in Atlanta before he discovered a knack for sitting behind a typewriter in an advertising agency and separating the particularly gullible from the contents of their wallets. When his 1969 Chevy Impala broke down in Jackson, Mississippi, he hoodwinked another unsuspecting agency into hiring him and embarked on a thirty-five year advertising spree, during which his work would drag him through six more agencies, collecting more than 400 industry awards in local, regional, national and global competitions along the way. Over the course of his three-decade bender, he worked on such major accounts as Delta Rose Rice ( "the rice that's gonna put Benoit, Mississippi, right back on the map"), FLEXpress ( "the weird little airline that's taking America by storm"), M.L. Lynch Turkey Calls, Yazoo Mowers and such minor clients as The Coca-Cola Company, Grumman/Gulfstream Aerospace, DowBrands (Texize Grease Relief), Sara Lee Corporation (Bryan Foods, "The Flavor of the South"), State of Mississippi Tourism and Viking Range. Not content to restrict his commercial intrusions to your daily newspaper or your favorite television program, Hicks also served as the restaurant critic for the now-defunct "Jackson" magazine, hosted talk shows on two radio stations and even did a short stint as the on-camera movie reviewer for the local ABC television network affiliate. Now dividing his time between the Mississippi heartland and the New Orleans French Quarter with his wife, jewelry designer Liliclaire McKinnon Hicks, and their gaggle of unruly sock monkeys, Steven Wells Hicks continues to develop branding and advertising programs on a limited basis through Davis&Hicks in Jackson. The Fall of Adam is his second novel.