In today’s episode, we meet Vernon Glenn, author of “Friday Calls: A Southern Novel,” which is set in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, mostly on a sinful Friday night.

Kirkus Reviews describes Glenn’s prose as “full of color and motion,” and says that “Friday Calls is a lyrical Southern tale of rippling effects.” When things go wrong on a Friday night on both sides of the tracks and on the tracks themselves, lives change quickly and the law comes to collect.

Lawyer Edward F. V. Terrell weaves his way amongst the chaos. He represents a white woman killed by a reckless but rich white man and defends a poor black man on trial for killing another black man in a drink house. The odds of prevailing require a cool head and a clever strategy.

Vernon starts the show with a reading a section of the book, where a train crash changes many lives and starts a story whose ending is uncertain to say the least.