Everything you need to understand or teach Trust and Victories by George V. Higgins.
Victories, according to its blurb, is the "companion novel" to Trust.
The relationship between the two is peculiar: both are set in the same period (fall-winter 1967 to 1968); significant characters appear in both novels; and the plots overlap in minor ways; yet each is an autonomous work. Victories is not a sequel to Trust.
Trust focuses upon the experience of Earl Beale, another example of Higgins's patented type, the loquacious grifter. Earl is a college basketball player who was caught and imprisoned for fixing games. Now, in late 1967, Earl sells used cars and schemes to exploit his girlfriend's sometime occupation as a rich man's mistress. Returning a favor for someone who has done him a favor, he also gets involved in a scheme to protect a philandering judge by stealing and destroying the judge's Mercedes. Both schemes go awry: Earl has sufficient street smarts to...
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