Category: Authors

What would you call a book with stories by Lawrence Block, S.A. Cosby, Joe R. Lansdale, David Morrell and 13 others?  Must Buy?  It is actually called Playing Games.  Here’s the lowdown…

WIN, LOSE, OR DIE.

Whether it’s child’s play or for the highest stakes, whether we stick to the rules or cheat, we all play games — for fun, for thrills, for love or money, to prove we’re the best or make an opponent knuckle under. And the games we play, with cards or dice or nothing but our wits, reveal something deeply personal about the players.

In this powerful new anthology, Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Lawrence Block has assembled an all-star team for the ultimate game night. Sit down at the checkerboard with S.A. Cosby, assemble jigsaw puzzles with David Morrell, or play marbles for the fate of the world with Joe R. Lansdale. In Jeffery Deaver’s hands, an innocent game of Candyland takes twists the Parker Brothers could never have imagined. Science-fiction grandmaster Robert Silverberg uncovers painful truths about destiny while betting on the turtle races in a Caribbean resort. And Lawrence Block himself out-Hitchcocks Hitchcock with his classic story of murder victims swapped by strangers on a handball court.

From hide-and-seek to Russian roulette, from mahjong to Mouse Trap, it’s a game lover’s dream — but beware: your turn is coming, and while winning isn’t everything, sometimes losing can be deadly…

And here’s the starred review from Publishers Weekly:

One of the most impressive of the 17 crime stories involving games in this stellar anthology from MWA Grand Master Block (In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper) is Block’s own “Strangers on a Handball Court.” It riffs on Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, as the title suggests, and provides a wholly fair plot with a gut-wrenching surprise. Even knowing that multiple twists are coming doesn’t negate their impact in Jeffery Deaver’s devious “The Babysitter,” which opens with a classic trope: the innocent everyperson who stumbles on a deadly secret. When the charges of 17-year-old Kelli Lambert get bored playing Candy Land, Kelli’s search for another board game leads her into peril after the parents of the kids she’s watching suspect she’s spotted their secret plans to torch a casino so they can establish their own casino. David Morrell shines with the subtle and creepy “The Puzzle Master,” in which a couple become addicted to jigsaw puzzles by a particular artist, only to find potentially ominous clues linking disparate bucolic scenes. The wide range of stories and games in them begs for a sequel.

Playing Games is available now.

Playing Games Paperback

Playing Games Kindle

Things Get Ugly: The Best Crime Stories of Joe R. Lansdale will be available August 15, 2023!  352 pages of Lansdale goodness.  Here’s the preview…

Edgar Award winner and bestselling author Joe R. Lansdale (the Hap and Leonard series), one of America’s most essential crime writers, heads back to the dangerous woods of East Texas. In his first crime career-retrospective, including previously uncollected work, Lansdale shows exactly why critics continue to compare him to Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner.

“Pulpy, blackly humorous, compulsively readable, and somehow both wildly surreal and down-to-earth. Lansdale is a national fucking treasure.”
―Christa Faust, author of Money Shot

In the 1950s, a young small-town projectionist mixes it up with a violent gang. When Mr. Bear is not alerting us to the dangers of forest fires, he lives a life of debauchery and murder. A brother and sister travel to Oklahoma to recover the dead body of their uncle. A lonely man engages in dubious acts while pining for his rubber duckie.

In this collection of nineteen unforgettable crime tales, Joe R. Lansdale brings his legendary mojo and gritty, dark humor to harrowing heists, revenge, homicide, and mayhem. No matter how they begin, things are bound to get ugly―and fast.

Pre-orders are available now.

Things Get Ugly  Paperback
Things Get Ugly  Kindle

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.

To Bring My Shadow Paperback
To Bring My Shadow Kindle

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.

Canary In The Coal Mine Paperback
Canary In The Coal Mine Kindle

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.

Below The Line Paperback
Below The Line Kindle

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!

Midnight Drive Paperback
Midnight Drive Kindle 

Duane Swierczynski’s new novel California Bear sounds like a must-buy.  Here’s the synopsis…

A cinematic new mystery from an award-winning crime writer, California Bear follows two unlikely vigilantes whose decision to take justice into their own hands pits them against the villains behind California’s coldest cases—and their own twisted histories.

California Bear drops on September 5, 2023.  Pre-orders are available now.

California Bear Hardcover
California Bear Kindle