Editing by Elizabeth

July 30, 2015

Lamentation by Joe Clifford

Someday, it would all change. Someday, I would make it right. Only someday never comes, does it? — Jay Porter

It’s hard for someday to come when you live life spinning your wheels stuck somewhere between the past and the present. Such is the state Jay Porter finds himself in.

Ever since his parents were killed in a car accident one winter twenty years ago when their car’s brakes failed, sending them off a bridge into an icy lake, Jay has been stuck in a holding pattern, his life failing to flourish.

A large reason Jay’s stuck in neutral is because of his brother, Chris. A decade older, Chris became Jay’s guardian after their parents were killed. Unfortunately, Chris also became a junkie, a thief and a liar. Now, Jay spends his days working dead-end, manual labor jobs just trying to keep his head above water, all while chasing and cleaning up after Chris.

Jay knows his brother is an anchor on his life—his loyalty to Chris even cost Jay his relationship with his girlfriend and two-year-old son—but blood ties run deep and Jay can’t find it in his heart to cut Chris completely loose no matter how bad he screws up.

Things take an ominous turn, however, when Chris disappears shortly after Jay bails him out of jail, yet again. Right before he went missing Chris was going on about having come across some very sensitive information, information that people are apparently willing to do anything, even commit murder, to keep from seeing the light of day. Now, Jay has to try and find his brother before the wrong people do, while also trying to keep himself from ending up in the crosshairs in the process. →

July 28, 2015

The Fury of Blacky Jaguar by Angel Luis Colón

“Fuck discreet. The boy needs a proper beating—no other way to handle it.” — Blacky Jaguar

Subtle is not a word Blacky Jaguar is familiar with. The ex-IRA enforcer, formerly known as Danny Clarke, lives his life at two speeds: idling or pushing the redline—there is no in-between.

So when his beloved 1959 Plymouth Fury goes missing, Blacky launches his own personal crusade to get the car back, and woe be it to whoever took his beloved “Polly,” or anyone standing between him and the goal of retrieving his ride.

Unfortunately for Blacky, once he starts down the warpath his familiar brand of over-the-top mayhem puts him on the radar of FBI Agent Linda Chen, a woman as dedicated to achieving her goal—busting Blacky—as he is to rescuing Polly. Chen also happens to be Blacky’s ex, so she’s double-barrel loaded for Blacky’s backside.

When their paths finally cross at a house in the Bronx owned by a gangster known as Osito, the Little Bear, the runaway train that is the fury of Blacky Jaguar finally runs completely off the rails in a blaze of retribution, righteous indignation, and glorious mayhem.

Though it weighs in at a trim 128 pages, Angel Luis Colón’s The Fury of Blacky Jaguar hits as hard as its Irish antihero Blacky does, mugging the reader and dragging him along for the ride, like it or not. But like it you will if you’re a fan of flying fists and good old fashioned pulp, as Colón has created in Blacky a character who deftly walks the line between cartoonish and compelling. →

July 17, 2015

Killing Secrets by Dianne Emley

“You’re going to be flying solo. You okay with that?” — Sergeant Early

Detective Nan Vining is used to being in situations where she has to fly solo. Both professionally as an investigator with the Pasadena Police Department and as a single mother raising a teenage daughter, Vining has reached a point where she’s learned to trust her instincts and go where they take her.

In Killing Secrets, however, the first entry in the Nan Vining series in five years (Read more from author Dianne Emley about revisiting Vining after such a layoff.), Vining finds herself farther out on a solo ledge than ever before.

The book opens with Vining’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Emily, and her boyfriend stumbling across a gruesome crime scene while out in a city park at dusk. Two people, one of their classmates and a popular teacher from their school, have been killed. As the investigator with the most seniority and experience, Vining naturally expects to be assigned the case. Upon arriving at the scene, however, she’s surprised to learn that two other investigators, one of them extremely inexperienced, have been given the assignment instead.

Her surprise turns to confusion, and then frustration, as the case is handled both in an unorthodox manner and with lightning speed. Someone high up in the PD is apparently in a hurry to chalk things up as a murder-suicide and be done with it. Vining isn’t convinced, and decides to dig deeper. →

July 15, 2015

The Comeback Character by Dianne Emley

It’s a pleasure to welcome LA Times bestselling author Dianne Emley back to the blog. Well-known for her Detective Nan Vining thrillers (The First Cut, Cut to the Quick, The Deepest Cut, and Love Kills) and Iris Thorne mysteries (Cold Call, Slow Squeeze, Fast Friends, Foolproof, and Pushover), Dianne’s newest entry in the Nan Vining series, Killing Secrets, is forthcoming from Random House on July 21st. →

July 09, 2015

New Yorked by Rob Hart

“New York is not a city. It is an idea.” — Ginny

Ashley (Ash) McKenna is a man molded and driven by ideas. As a boy growing up on Staten Island, Ash would sit with his firefighter father in the wee hours of the night listening to the emergency scanner, his dad patiently explaining to him what all the mysterious calls and codes meant.

Watching his father go to work, both as scheduled and spontaneously in response to some of those emergency calls, Ash formed strong ideas of duty, honor, and responsibility. And when his father was killed on 9/11 while attempting to evacuate people on the upper floors of the World Trade Center, Ash was branded with the idea of sacrifice. And loss.

So when Ash pulls himself up out of the depths of a blackout drunk one afternoon only to learn that his longtime friend and unrequited love, Chell, has been murdered, his whole world comes crashing down around him.

The loss he feels is complicated and compounded by the message he finds from Chell on his cell phone, apparently left only minutes before her death. She’d reached out to Ash for help, begged him to come meet her because she was only streets away from his apartment and feared she was being followed, and Ash failed—failed to meet his self-appointed responsibility to protect her.

Ash can’t live with that. And he won’t let whoever murdered Chell live with it, either. →

July 03, 2015

Gun Needle Spoon by Patrick O’Neil

I shot dope, sold drugs, did crimes, went to jail. It doesn’t mean I have to continue living like that. — Patrick O’Neil

Patrick O’Neil shouldn’t be alive. Statistically, at least, he should be either dead or locked up for the rest of his life. That he is neither dead nor in jail given the life he’s lead is a testament to the power of the human spirit.

That, and a good lawyer.

I first “met” Patrick in that causal online way you do these days, following him on

July 02, 2015

Murder Boy by Bryon Quertermous

I was staring at the bodies and feeling more confused and nauseated than heroic. — Dominick Prince

Having been stuck in the wasteland that is crime and poverty-ridden Detroit for the majority of his life, things were finally headed in the right direction for Dominick Prince; he was on the verge of getting a fresh start.

As soon as his creative writing professor, Parker Farmington, signed off on Dominick’s final thesis project, Dominick would be on his way to New York City and a waiting writing fellowship. But a funny thing happened on the way to the bright lights of the Big Apple.

Farmington refused to sign off.

At the end of his rope and desperate, Dominick comes up with a novel solution: kidnap Farmington and force him to sign. Not the way most people would go, granted, but Dominick is truly convinced he has nothing left to lose.

And so, fueled by a combination of alcohol, rage and desperation, with a chaser of self-delusion, Dominick sets his plot into motion. The results are undeniably disastrous, and marvelously madcap. As Dominick’s ill-conceived plan pinballs from pillar to post, author Bryon Quertermous introduces a colorful cast of supporting characters, each of whom adds their own special flavor to the mix. →

June 26, 2015

Knuckleball by Tom Pitts

“He made us all victims,” one caller said. “It was a hate crime of the worst kind, the hate was for us all, for society.”

As the city of San Francisco gets ready to direct some good-natured hate against their loathed baseball rival Dodgers during a three-game series with their beloved Giants, a different kind of hate is stalking the city’s Mission District.

In a senseless act of seemingly random violence, Officer Hugh Patterson is brutally gunned down at the end of his shift while standing outside a taqueria watching the game on the TV inside through the window. His partner, who had stepped away to make a phone call, gets to the scene too late—too late to save Patterson’s life, and too late to even see the perp, let alone apprehend him.

Though the city bands together to express their shock and outrage, turing Patterson into a modern-day folk hero in the process, few leads appear in the crime’s immediate aftermath. But as a reward for information leading to the arrest of the killer grows in the following days, an eyewitness comes forward.

Fifteen-year-old Oscar Flores lives in an apartment across the street from where Patterson was gunned down. An avid Giants fan, he was in his room watching the game when the crime occurred and claims to have seen the entire thing while looking out the window between innings. It seems like the break the police need to solve the crime, and so you think you know exactly where the narrative’s going as it rounds third and heads for home. But as author Tom Pitts has demonstrated time and again, he’s a master at putting his characters in a moral pickle. →

June 22, 2015

A Murder Country by Brandon Daily

“Don’t lie to me. I am your final judgment here. I am your final chance for salvation.” —The Rider

The setting: late nineteenth century. The players: three men moving through a violent and unforgiving world, two looking for earthly revenge, one the self-appointed hand of God. The stakes: a quest to understand man’s place in the world and how the power of belief—and a single act or decision—can set the course of one’s life.

Young Josiah Fuller’s life is irrevocably altered when, upon returning home from a multi-day hunting trip, he finds his parents have been brutally murdered. Not content simply to kill, whoever was responsible tortured the Fullers before stringing them up from a tree and burning down the homestead.

Josiah makes a vow to avenge their murders, and sets out on a quest to track and find the person(s) responsible. Along the way, he is forced through his interactions with the people he encounters to deeply examine his life, and to ask the question whether trading his eternal soul for the satisfaction of earthly vengeance is something he’s truly prepared to do.

William Corvin was once a man of violence, but has reformed his life and now oversees his family’s coal mine. When a random encounter with two drifters visits violence upon Corvin’s pregnant wife, like young Josiah, Corvin is forced to confront the question of whether slipping back into his old skin is worth the loss of his peaceful, hard fought for new life. →

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