Editing by Elizabeth

May 06, 2010

The Kult by Shaun Jeffrey

“People are predictable. That’s what makes them easy to kill.” – The Oracle

Killing people is The Oracle’s business, and business is good in author Shaun Jeffrey’s incredibly dark novel The Kult. The Oracle, you see, doesn’t just kill people; he tortures and mutilates them in horrifying ways, turning them, in his mind, into macabre works of art. Then he takes photographs of his creations, which he sends to the police.

Detective Chief Inspector Prosper Snow is in charge of The Oracle investigation. He’s also a member of the Kult, a small group of friends he’s known since his school days. Initially formed when they were just kids to help each other deal with bullies, the Kult stayed in contact over the years, occasionally calling on each other for assistance with increasingly “grown up” issues.

An email Snow receives from one of the members calling for a meeting leads to the group facing the most grown up issue possible: murder. At the meeting, Snow learns that the wife of one of his friends has been raped and not only does his friend intend to seek revenge, he expects his fellow Kult members to assist. He argues that the timing is perfect for them to kill his wife’s rapist, because if they do so in a sufficiently gruesome manner it will be blamed on The Oracle.

Though he’d always been there for the Kult in the past, Snow can’t agree to such extreme action. That is, not until his supposed friends inform him that if he doesn’t help, including supplying them with the inside information necessary to copy the unique m.o. of The Oracle, they will reveal to his superiors all the previous questionable activities in which Snow has participated. Caught between the proverbial rock and hard place, Snow caves and assists in the killing. And that is when things go from merely screwed up to genuinely life threatening, because following their attempt to frame The Oracle for the murder they commit the Kult members begin getting knocked off themselves.

In The Oracle Jeffrey has conjured up one of the nastiest, most perversely creative serial killers in recent memory, which makes it all the more impressive that Jeffrey did not make his protagonist an über-Detective. Quite the contrary, Snow spends most of the story frustrated, one step behind, and continuously making extremely questionable decisions based on emotion rather than logic… which makes him a believable and sympathetic lead.

The tension and stakes rise to almost stifling levels as Snow races to discover The Oracle’s identity before he finds himself in the crosshairs, setting the stage for a truly disturbing showdown in The Oracle’s decidedly creepy lair. Definitely not for the faint-of-heart, The Kult is a gripping read that’s part horror, part mystery, part police procedural, and completely in-your-face.

Shaun Jeffrey is the author of over 40 published short stories, one collection entitled

May 03, 2010

Rolling Thunder by Chris Grabenstein

“I used to round up shopping carts in the parking lot at Wal-Mart. Then I met Ceepak and life’s been one big roller coaster ride ever since.” – Danny Boyle

Officer Danny Boyle isn’t the only one going for a roller coaster ride in Rolling Thunder, the sixth entry in author Chris Grabenstein’s John Ceepak/Jersey Shore mystery series. Memorial Day weekend in Sea Haven, New Jersey finds Danny and his partner, John Ceepak, working crowd control at the grand opening of the Rolling Thunder roller coaster. “Big Paddy” O’Malley, owner of the Rolling Thunder, his family, and assorted town dignitaries are also on hand to be the first to experience the seaside town’s newest attraction.

They get more than they bargained for when Mrs. O’Malley has a heart attack and dies during the coaster’s initial run. Though the death appears on the surface to be nothing more than an unfortunate tragedy, Ceepak and Danny are bothered by the lack of distress exhibited by several members of the family and begin looking into the workings of the O’Malley clan. As they are doing so another death, this one unquestionably a murder, confirms their suspicion that something is fishy in Sea Haven.

As with all previous entries in this outstanding series, Grabenstein serves up a wonderfully complex mystery for Ceepak and Danny to tackle. Along the way they must deal with a jealous, potentially criminally complicit colleague, prominent members of the community engaging in organized activities of questionable legality, a mayor who wants nothing more than to not upset the tourists, and a family with Shakespearean levels of dysfunction. →

April 29, 2010

The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville

“All I wanted was some peace. I just wanted to sleep.” – Gerry Fegan

Set in Belfast in the aftermath of Northern Ireland’s Troubles*, The Ghosts of Belfast introduces us to ex-con Gerry Fegan. Treated by the locals as a hero for his activities as a “hard man” during the Troubles, activities that got him sent to prison for twelve years, Fegan just wants to leave his past in the past and live out his life in peace. That, unfortunately, isn’t going to happen.

The guilt of his own conscience weighs heavily enough upon him, but that is not the only burden Fegan has to bear. Shortly before his release from prison Fegan began getting visits. Not from friends or family, but from the ghosts of the twelve people he killed during the Troubles. Sometimes only one or two at a time, other times all twelve at once, when we meet Fegan it has been seven long years since his “followers,” as he calls them, first came calling.

Tormented to the very edge of sanity, Fegan barely manages to do more each day than wander down to the pub, get drunk, go home and pass out, then get up and do it all over again. One night a friend Fegan used to run with before his time in prison comes to visit him in the pub. Now a smooth talking politician, Fegan’s friend, McKenna, was once one of the men Fegan took orders from during the Troubles. Orders that led to deaths, including one of Fegan’s followers, the one he calls “The Boy.” →

April 19, 2010

Shoot To Thrill by P.J. Tracy

“So what we might have is a bunch of amoral whack jobs telling the other amoral whack jobs out there that it’s A-okay to murder, and then they all start believing it for real?” – Detective Gino Rolseth

Unfortunately, that appears to be precisely the situation facing Minneapolis Police Detective Gino Rolseth, his partner Leo Magozzi, and the Monkeewrench computer crew in Shoot To Thrill, the fifth entry in P.J. Tracy’s Monkeewrench series. It’s been four years since the last book in the series was released, and in addition to giving readers a satisfying dose of Harley Davidson, Grace MacBride, Annie Belinski and Roadrunner, aka the Monkeewrench crew, Shoot To Thrill also introduces a strong new character to the mix, FBI Special Agent John Smith.

Smith, whose “life had always been about as ordinary as his name,” is only six months away from mandatory retirement from the FBI after 30 years of service when he suddenly finds himself in charge of an investigation into a series of video clips posted online which appear to depict actual murders. Despite having determined that all the clips originated from the same location, the FBI is unable to trace the videos back to their ultimate source due to extremely sophisticated masking techniques employed by the person or people posting them.

Enter Monkeewrench, which Smith enlists to help trace the origin of the clips, as well as to design a software program that will be able to run an analysis of similar videos posted online to determine if they depict real murders or are staged ‘murders’ posted by copycats seeking their 15 minutes of fame. Detectives Rolseth and Magozzi, veterans of working cases with the Minneapolis-based Monkeewrench crew, find themselves drawn into the Federal investigation when Monkeewrench discovers a video indicating that a local death the detectives recently investigated, one which initially appeared to be an accidental drowning, was in fact a murder connected to the series being investigated by Monkeewrench and the FBI.

That law enforcement personnel would find themselves in the position of investigating a series of murders committed, filmed and posted online purely for the purpose of attention seeking and one-upmanship is a disturbing concept, one which may have even seemed far-fetched not too long ago. But the relatively recent proliferation of online social networking sites has changed both the way people act as individuals, as well as the way they interact with others. Online anonymity gives people ‘keyboard courage’ to spew hatred and intolerance, to give voice to their darkest thoughts, and allows them to find easy acceptance and encouragement from other like-minded people, all without leaving the comfort of their home. It’s almost as if the web, one character in Shoot To Thrill argues, “is normalizing deviant behavior.”

And there is quite a bit of deviant behavior to be investigated in this outing, all done with the usual Monkeewrench flair. The black humor and banter between Rolseth

April 12, 2010

A Thousand Cuts by Simon Lelic

“Why was the onus always on the weak when it was the strong that had the liberty to act? Why were the weak obliged to be so brave when the strong had license to behave like such cowards?”

So asks DI Lucia May in A Thousand Cuts (originally published in the UK under the title Rupture), the debut novel from author Simon Lelic. May is the detective charged with investigating the seemingly open and shut case of a shooting at a North London comprehensive school (the equivalent of an American public high school) that leaves five dead, including the gunman. The investigation that unfolds is not so much a whodunit as a whydunit, as it is clear from the outset that the shooter was one of the school’s teachers, Samuel Szajkowski, who opened fire during a school assembly killing three students and a fellow teacher before turning the gun on himself.

Szajkowski, a young man new to both teaching and the school, is described by students and faculty alike as having been somewhat of a misfit, odd and aloof, who never quite found his footing at the school. This, however, does not seem to DI May to be sufficient explanation for Szajkowski’s murderous outburst, and her interviews with students and faculty indeed uncover a truth which is much more sinister.

Lelic reveals the events which led up to the shooting through chapters that alternate between DI May’s first person perspective and monologues from various people – students, parents, faculty – involved with and affected by the tragedy. The monologues are meant to represent transcriptions of interviews taped by DI May during the course of her investigation, but they omit May’s side of the conversation. It’s an interesting technique, one which lets the reader imagine what was said by May to elicit certain responses, to feel almost as though they were the one asking the questions. →

March 30, 2010

Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell

Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell is the first book since Minette Walters’s The Shape of Snakes that genuinely took my breath away. On the surface there is absolutely nothing pretty about the world in which 16-year-old Ree Dolly lives. The people of her community in the backwoods of the Ozark mountains are multiple generations into an existence of poverty, violence and drug addiction; a place where the primary source of income has evolved from making moonshine to cooking crank.

Fortunately for Ree her father, Jessup, is in demand as a crank chef, “practically half famous for it.” Unfortunately for her and the two younger brothers and mentally ill mother she’s struggling to keep fed and functioning, Jessup has gone missing after being released on bond, a bond secured by signing over the family home as collateral, following his most recent arrest. Unwilling to see her family split up if they lose the family’s meager homestead, Ree sets out to find Jessup and make him keep his court date.

Not only is Jessup nowhere to be found, however, but none of the locals, many of them extended members of the Dolly family, seem inclined to help Ree with her search. In fact, they are downright hostile to her inquiries and seemingly determined to derail her efforts, even by means of violence if necessary. Yet, Ree persists. And throughout it all Woodrell offers glimpses of the hidden beauty lurking beneath the surface of the stark environment, and conveys in no uncertain terms that the people who inhabit it have a deep sense of honor, pride and purpose, just ones that don’t necessarily mesh with what most consider normal. →

March 22, 2010

Dweller by Jeff Strand

Primarily known for his deft touch in combining horror and comedy, Dweller is Jeff Strand’s second ‘serious’ novel, following the Bram Stoker Award nominated Pressure, and with his newest offering Strand may well see another Stoker nomination headed his way.

Dweller introduces us to Toby, an 8 year old with an active imagination and difficulty making friends. Though he’s been told by his parents not to, Toby enjoys playing in the woods that border the backyard of his house. Lost in fantasy while playing one summer day, Toby comes to find himself deep in the woods… much deeper, in fact, than he’s ever been. Scared of the trouble he’ll be in when he gets home late, Toby desperately tries to find his way out of the woods, but what he finds instead will change his life forever.

Toby, you see, finds a monster. An honest-to-goodness, hairy, yellow-eyed, razor-clawed, fanged beast. Of course Toby does what any 8 year old would do under the circumstances… runs away! Once safely back at home he’s chastised by his parents for his misadventure, and as the summer passes Toby convinces himself he didn’t really see a monster in the woods. He couldn’t have, right? Monsters don’t exist.

Flash forward seven years to a Toby who has made the woods his place of refuge from the bullies at school and tedious evenings with his family. While exploring one day after school Toby discovers a cave, which he proceeds to investigate with the notion that it may be his ticket to getting some friends, maybe even a girlfriend, if he has a cool cave-fort he can bring them to. →

March 12, 2010

Moonlight Falls by Vincent Zandri

Moonlight Falls by Vincent Zandri It takes serious balls to begin a book with your protagonist deliberately putting a bullet into his own head, but that’s exactly how Vincent Zandri kicks off his high-octane new thriller Moonlight Falls. Richard “Dick” Moonlight, you see, is not your typical protagonist. In fact, he’s seriously screwed up. As one character tells him, “You fell off the tree of fucked-up-weird and slammed every branch on the way down.” Fucked-up-weird notwithstanding, it’s the fragment of .22 bullet left in his brain following his book opening suicide attempt that forces Moonlight’s retirement from the Albany police department.

Unable to commit to a new job because the placement of the bullet fragment leaves him prone to untimely blackouts and seizures, not to mention serious lapses in judgment, Moonlight finds himself being called upon by his former partner to serve as an outside investigator on cases that need a discrete, but ‘official’, rubber stamping in order to close them… for a fee, of course.

This arrangement becomes a problem when he’s called to the scene of the apparent suicide of Scarlet Montana, wife of his ex-boss Chief of Detectives Jake Montana. Unlike previous callouts, Moonlight can’t bring himself to rubber stamp suicide as the cause of death, collect his under the table fee and be done with it. The sticking point? Not only was Moonlight having an affair with her, but he had been with her only hours before her death. What’s more, given his spotty memory – not to mention the bloody, scratched up hands he doesn’t remember acquiring – he honestly doesn’t know if he could be responsible for her death. But he’s determined to find out what really happened to Scarlet, no matter what the consequences to himself may be.

What unfolds over the course of his investigation provides a non-stop, tension filled ride for the reader; one that includes a mysterious albino, Fugitive-esque pursuit by authorities, grave robbing, a police conspiracy, and a black market organ harvesting ring. There is so much going on that even the most accomplished reader of mysteries and thrillers will be hard pressed to figure out in advance what really happened, as Moonlight Falls delivers twists and swerves right up until the final chapter, even after having seemingly revealed the answer to the mystery.

To learn more about Vincent Zandri, visit his website.

-Moonlight Falls: Book Trailer –

March 02, 2010

Dawn of the Dreadfuls by Steve Hockensmith

One of the surprise sensations in the publishing industry last year was Quirk Classics’ Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a mashup which re-imagined Elizabeth Bennet as romantically jaded martial arts expert up to her eyes in zombies, also known as ‘dreadfuls’. Though railed against by some Jane Austen purists as sacrilege, adding zombies to such a well known, if intimidating, classic arguably exposed it to a new audience of readers who otherwise may well have never read it (in any form). Such success obviously called for a follow up, right?

Naturally. But instead of going the traditional sequel route, Quirk Classics went in the other direction and has given us a prequel: Dawn of the Dreadfuls. Set several years prior to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Dawn of the Dreadfuls takes the reader on a journey through the dawn of the zombie plague and Elizabeth’s tentative first steps toward becoming the ultimate zombie killing warrior. Along the way we encounter, among other things, a scientific attempt to interact with a dreadful… through music and dancing (just go with it), a creative use of croquet balls and mallets, and the timely arrival of ninjas.

Obviously Jane Austen did not actually write a prequel to Pride and Prejudice, so author Steve Hockensmith had a freer hand than his Pride and Prejudice and Zombies predecessor to create his tale without being tied to source material. But what made Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a true phenomenon was its creative mashup of classic literate with classic horror, and that hook worked precisely because the reader already knew the story being (lovingly) spoofed. Once the story isn’t tied to an actual classic work, it’s really just another zombie story in an odd setting. →

-Moonlight Falls: Book Trailer –

Editing Services

Featured Reviews & Interviews

Anticipated Reads