Editing by Elizabeth

September 15, 2015

The Killing Kind by Chris Holm

“I’ve been asked to send a message. Your death is merely to be the punctuation mark at the end of said message.” — Alexander Engleman

FBI Special Agent Charlotte Thompson has an obsession. Over a period of several years she’s been tracking a man she calls the ghost, a hit man she’s convinced is responsible for an unusual string of murders—her ghost only kills other hit men.

Neither her new partner nor her bosses at the Bureau are convinced.

But as it turns out, calling her quarry a ghost is incredibly apt since, unbeknownst to Thompson, the target of her obsession is dead. Well, on the books he is anyway.

Michael Hendricks was once a member of a covert ops unit sent to perform false-flag missions for the US government. When all but two members of his squad—Hendricks and one other—were killed in a roadside attack in Afghanistan, Hendricks saw it as an opportunity to disappear and start his life over.

Upon finding his way back to the States, Hendricks decided to put his special skill set to use in a way he hopes will help him clear his conscience and earn redemption—he becomes a killer of killers. With the help of his friend, tech wizard Lester Myers, the other survivor of that attack in Afghanistan, Hendricks identifies people who are targets of impending “hits” and offers to take out the hit man assigned the job—for a price: ten times the cost of the hit. People who accept Hendricks’s offer live to see another day. Those who decide to pass, well, their track record isn’t too great when they decide to roll the dice without Hendricks as backup. →

September 11, 2015

Why I Write Crime by Chris Holm

It’s a pleasure to welcome Chris Holm back to the blog. You can check out all of Chris’s previous guest posts, as well as my reviews of his work, in the Chris Holm archive. Today, Chris is here in conjunction with his impending release, The Killing Kind (Mulholland, Sept. 15th), which introduces the character Michael Hendricks, a hitman with a twist: he only takes out other hitmen.

Chris Holm Why I Write Crime

My grandfather on my mother’s side—Papa to his grandkids, because nobody, but nobody, called him Grandpa—was a great many things. A decent man. A fierce competitor. A stern disciplinarian. A consummate storyteller.

But most of all, Papa was a cop.

A damn good one, by all accounts. Papa rose through the ranks of the Syracuse PD from beat cop to Deputy Chief, busting his share of bad guys along the way. Somehow, despite everything he’d seen, he still never locked his doors at night. “If they want to get in, they’ll get in,” he’d say. “No point forcing them to break a window to do it.”

I remember riding with him in his Caddy (he always said that when he made it, he was gonna get a Cadillac—and even though his turned out to be a piece of junk, he loved it just the same) while he made his weekend rounds, my legs not yet long enough for my feet to reach the floor mats. To the newsstand, for a Batman comic (mine) and a Sunday paper (his). To his favorite bakery to pick up doughnuts (some stereotypes are true, I guess; the man was thin as a rail, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t love a good doughnut). To the Public Safety Building, where every cop in the place would say hello to me like I was some kind of VIP. →

August 31, 2015

Not Even Past by Dave White

“It wasn’t a foolproof plan. Not even close.” — Bill Martin

The last time readers saw New Jersey-based ex-cop turned private investigator Jackson Donne (The Evil That Men Do) things were decidedly rocky, serious problems with both his family and his profession having reared their heads.

Now, three years later, Donne has turned the corner. He’s deep into the process of earning his degree, having gone back to college after being forced to leave the private investigation business, and is engaged with a wedding date looming. Things are going well.

Until Donne gets an email that completely blindsides him, turning life as he knows it forever upside down.

At first it appears to be some weird spam with a click-bait subject: Click and watch. Her life depends on it. Normally, Donne would know better than to click on links in strange emails, but the email also contains an eight-year-old photo of him graduating from the police academy—there is some level of personalization there.

Against his better judgment, Donne follows the link, which leads him to an ominous video of a woman bathed in spotlights bound to a chair in an empty room, battered and screaming for her life. It’s a sight that would be disturbing enough on its own, but what makes the hair on the back of Donne’s neck stand up is that he knows the woman…and had thought for the past six years she was dead. →

August 14, 2015

Rumrunners by Eric Beetner

“Hugh, after this if you ever see me again it will mean we’re both dead and the devil made us roommates.” — Calvin McGraw

Calvin McGraw has seen and done a lot in his 86 years, a great bit of it illegal. Let’s get one thing clear up front though: Calvin McGraw is no criminal—he’s an outlaw. It’s a distinction that makes all the difference in the world to the McGraw family, who have been the go-to drivers for the Stanley clan’s off-the-books enterprise for almost a century.

Now though, there’s trouble in outlaw paradise, in more ways than one. For starters, the McGraw-Stanley connection already looked to be coming to an end. Though Calvin had successfully passed the shifter to his son, Webb, Calvin’s grandson, Tucker, decided to break the chain, opting instead to go into the insurance business. It was a move Calvin and Webb found both disappointing and embarrassing, but in the end they could live with it.

A bigger problem has taken center stage, however, one the McGraws may not be able to live with. Tapped by Stanley patriarch Hugh for a high-stakes and well-paying job, Webb is reluctant to admit he can’t drive an eighteen-wheeler. Instead, Webb enlists the aid of a driver he barely knows, and things go very badly indeed—the cargo is hijacked from Webb, who takes a few hard bumps in the process. Now Webb has two choices: go on the run, or go back to Hugh and admit he lost the precious cargo. →

August 13, 2015

Bite Harder by Anonymous-9

I look useless, you think. You think wrong. — Dean Drayhart

When we last saw Dean Drayhart and Sid, the lead duo in Anonymous-9’s critically-acclaimed Hard Bite, Dean was in jail and Sid’s fate was unclear. And while one could read Bite Harder without first having read Hard Bite, Bite Harder is a sequel in the very truest sense of the word—events pick up literally where those of the first book left off and expand upon them—so I do think to get the most out of Bite Harder one should first read Hard Bite.

To that end, a quick recap of the premise of Hard Bite is in order (my full review here).

Dean Drayhart used to be a normal guy, until a hit-and-run driver destroyed everything he held dear—his daughter was killed, he was maimed and paralyzed, and his marriage disintegrated. Stuck in a funk, things took an interesting turn when Dean was provided with a service animal, Sid, an extremely well-trained capuchin monkey.

Together, the two turned into vigilantes, unleashing vengeance on hit-and-run drivers across LA—on the command of “hard bite” from Dean adorable little Sid will rip someone’s jugular out with his not so adorable fangs. Unfortunately, one of their targets/victims happened to be the son of Orella Malalinda, matriarch of a Mexican drug cartel, and needless to say things got very messy—many died, Dean ended up arrested, and Sid was in the wind. Cue Bite Harder. →

August 10, 2015

Pig Iron by David James Keaton

“Sister, I’ve said a lot of things. But that was before the world ended.” — Preacher

The place is Aqua Fría, a nothing town in the middle of nowhere, fast running out of water and hope. The players are The Ranger, a man destined from birth to wear a badge and uphold the law; Red, leader of a gang of thieves and killers, a man destined from birth to be The Ranger’s nemesis; the various residents of Aqua Fría and members of Red’s gang; a horse with no name, but with a hole in its head; and last but certainly not least, a crafty camel spider.

How exactly that all fits together is a bit too complicated to explain, but suffice it to say that those who didn’t hightail it out of Aqua Fría before the wells ran dry are now staring at a ticking clock: three days until they die of dehydration. Three days to make their peace and square up their debts, earthly and spiritual. Three days to, perhaps, find some way out of the hell they are quickly descending into.

Folks, Pig Iron, the latest from David James Keaton, is not your daddy’s Western. That is, not unless your daddy dropped a lot of acid and was particularly fond of camel spiders and walking-dead horses. →

August 06, 2015

The Bitch by Les Edgerton

I was sailing right into the nasty part, and I had a feeling it was only going to get worse. — Jake Bishop

Jake Bishop is on the verge of achieving the American dream. He’s married, he and his wife have their first baby on the way, he has some college under his belt, and he’s a few short weeks from making the leap from working as a stylist in someone else’s salon to opening his own shop.

True, Bishop didn’t exactly take the most direct route to get there, and the trip wasn’t without some serious bumps in the road. For one thing, he’s a recovering alcoholic, though it’s been years since he’s touched the stuff. More serious, he’s an ex-con, having done two stints for burglary at Pendleton Reformatory, a maximum security prison in Indiana.

Still, the past is the past, and everything seems to be going fine. Until the call comes that alters Bishop’s life irrevocably.

Seems Bishop’s old cellmate from Pendleton, Walker “Spitball” Joy, has a job he’d like Bishop’s help with. The kind of job Bishop doesn’t do anymore. Problem is, Bishop kinda owes Spitball, who looked out for Bishop during his last stretch in the joint. Figuring he owes Spitball at least a sit-down, Bishop goes for the meet. There, he finds out the situation is much more dire than just a prison buddy trying to cash in a moral IOU. Seems Spitball’s in deep with the wrong person, someone he shared information about Bishop with. The kind of information that gives them leverage Bishop can’t easily say no to. →

August 03, 2015

Bull Mountain by Brian Panowich

“It was your grandfather let loose the demons on this mountain, and there ain’t no putting that genie back in the bottle.” — Val

Albert “Val” Valentine knows of what he speaks, as the fate of the Valentine family has been intertwined with that of the Burroughs clan since as far back as anyone can remember. And the more things change in the Burroughs fiefdom of Bull Mountain in North Georgia, the more they stay the same.

The Burroughs have been making their living off the mountain and the vices of men for generations, first by running moonshine, then branching out into marijuana, and most recently by moving meth. Throughout it all, the Burroughs and those who serve them have existed in their own world up on Bull Mountain, isolated and insulated from outsiders, including the law.

Sure, attempts were made over the years to bring whoever was in charge of the clan at the time down, but no one has ever been able to conquer the Burroughs, or Bull Mountain.

What outsiders have never been able to accomplish, however, may finally be on the verge of happening thanks to a Burroughs himself. Clayton Burroughs, tired of the family’s seemingly never-ending cycle of criminality, boldly chose to walk a different path—Sheriff. This choice understandably set him at odds with the family and its reigning patriarch, his brother, Halford. And while Clayton has made the conscious decision not to pro-actively get into Halford’s business—as long as it doesn’t spill down off the mountain into town—Clayton’s presented with a unique opportunity when Federal Agent Simon Holly shows up in his office. →

August 01, 2015

Unholy Bargain

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