Fast Car by Ralph Bland

Ralph Bland’s thirteenth novel, Fast Car, is the story of the friendship shared between an older man in his fifties and a young man closing fast on his thirties in current day Nashville, Tennessee. The two meet while working as automobile mechanics for an elite foreign car repair shop that caters mostly to the wealthy; the younger, Leonard Wright, is the nephew of the owner and a recent rehabilitation graduate from a bout with drugs and theft of company funds from his previous place of employment, and the elder, Sam Thornton, is an ex-con from peddling drugs back in his college days and the owner of a battered 1965 Sunbeam Tiger that has seen better days but is his lifetime pride and joy, having inherited it as a young boy after his father’s death. Leonard takes a job with his uncle as a means of finding himself a better standing and an escape from his failed former existence, while Sam arrives under mysterious circumstances to work at John Wright’s business as an elite mechanic with a