Scott Phillips stopped by last year to talk about his novel Rake, in which an amoral American soap opera actor becomes a star on French television and attempts to make a movie while dealing the shadiest sides of the Parisian wealthy. His new western novel, Hop Alley, sees the return of Bill Ogden, who was introduced in the novel Cottonwood. Ogden is a good-natured sociopath who skates through life with little thought to consequences in the American Wild West.