Craig Zablo

Anthony Neil Smith posted The Independent Fiction Alliance’s choices for the best books of 2022 published by small independent presses or independent writers.

To Bring My Shadow by Matt Phillips is one of them.  Here’s the lowdown…

This haunting, hardboiled tale follows detective Frank “Slim Fat” Pinson and his partner as they try to unravel the vexing mystery surrounding a who-done-it drug murder in San Diego.

Frank “Slim Fat” Pinson is your regular hardboiled murder cop—hell, Frank’s a cliché. His wife is dead after jumping from a bridge and he’s a mal-practicing Catholic. He’s tough as nails. Hard as sin. Except not.

When Frank and his partner, “Skinny” Slade Ryerson, catch a cartel murder case, they’re sucked into a black hell of political corruption with ties to Santa Muerte. And Frank—a man who knows himself so well—spins into an epic crisis of faith.

The first detective novel from acclaimed pulp writer Matt Phillips introduces readers to a fascinating character of indefensible fault, immense morality, and incalculable demise.

Anthony Neil Smith posted The Independent Fiction Alliance’s choices for the best books of 2022 published by small independent presses or independent writers.

Canary In The Coal Mine by Charles Salzberg is one of them.  Here’s the lowdown…

PI Pete Fortunato, half-Italian, half-Jewish, who suffers from anger management issues and insomnia, wakes up one morning with a bad taste in his mouth. This is never a good sign. Working out of a friend’s downtown real estate office, Fortunato, who spent a mysteriously short, forgettable stint as a cop in a small upstate New York town, lives from paycheck to paycheck. So, when a beautiful woman wants to hire him to find her husband, he doesn’t hesitate to say yes. Within a day, Fortunato finds the husband in the apartment of his client’s young, stud lover. He’s been shot once in the head. Case closed. But when his client’s check bounces, and a couple of Albanian gangsters show up outside his building and kidnap him, hoping he’ll lead them to a large sum of money supposedly stolen by the dead man, he begins to realize there’s a good chance he’s been set up to take the fall for the murder and the theft of the money.

In an attempt to get himself out of a jam, Fortunato winds up on a wild ride that takes him down to Texas where he searches for his client’s lover who he suspects has the money and holds the key to solving the murder.

Anthony Neil Smith posted The Independent Fiction Alliance’s choices for the best books of 2022 published by small independent presses or independent writers.

Below The Line by Steven Jankowski is one of them.  Here’s the lowdown…

In between gigs as a Hollywood movie Teamster, self-proclaimed sailing bum Mike Millek moonlights as a freelance, armed chauffeur to the stars. When Mike arrives one night to pick up his deadbeat client, rap music producer Pays Lee, at his private jet Mike finds him freshly murdered with a satchel full of cash. Mike makes the critical decision to take what is owed him before reporting anything to the police.

More money than he ever expected, this turns out to be Mike’s biggest payday in his life, but not without consequences. Opening this Pandora’s box not only costs him his best friend’s life and leads him down a road of deception with his newly found love Molly, but thrusts them both into a dangerous conspiracy entrenched in the sordid underbelly of the Hollywood power elite.

Anthony Neil Smith posted The Independent Fiction Alliance’s choices for the best books of 2022 published by small independent presses or independent writers.  This is one of them…

Midnight Drive by Kenneth Price is the first novel in the Logan Claybourne series.  Here’ the lowdown…

Kenny Prince enjoyed the finer things in life – namely cocaine, strippers, and a 1976 Corvette Stingray. But Kenny wound up dead on his couch with two bullet holes in him and a QR code slapped onto the wall above his body. So now it’s up to Logan Claybourne to find who did it. Not that Logan gives a rat’s ass. He’s not a detective. He’s a repo man. And if he wants money to fund his unhinged gambling addiction, he’s going to have to find the Stingray before the police do. The mystery will take him around the cold and unforgiving streets of Edmonton, Canada’s northernmost city, where everyone seems to know Logan’s secrets and answers can only be found in the middle of the night.

Midnight Drive is the first book in the Logan Claybourne series by Kenneth Price. Set in a world of pawn shops, casinos, and hardscrabble people trying to get by, this novel peeks down the dark alleys we instinctively look away from. Questions around fate and the gears operating in the background of our lives weave through its pages while throughout the rough and tumble streets of Edmonton are tooled into a tale of high-octane crime fiction.

This is noir with a V8 engine under the hood.

So get in. Shut up. And hold on!