Marjorie Standiford sits on Oklahoma's death row, hours away from execution, speaking into a tape recorder, telling her life story. She's answering questions about how she became the Speed Queen, one of the Sonic Killers -- how mainlining speed with her husband, Lamont, and her lover, Natalie, grew into dealing, how dealing turned into robbery, and robbery into mass murder. She's telling her story because she wants to set the record straight, to correct the lies in Natalie's book, which became a bestseller. Majorie's book will be better. It will be written by America's most popular novelist -- the king of horror.

Told in Marjorie's dreamy, bemused voice, and scored by the blare of the dashboard radio, The Speed Queen is a taut, violent, darkly comic tale set against a uniquely American landscape of fast-food joints and endless highways, from a writer whose novels have been called "masterful" by the Washington Post and "stunning" by the New York Times.