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May 23, 2012

The Vegas Knockout by Tom Schreck

I was half an hour from the most exciting city in the world living in a house where sex went on constantly and I had nothing to do until two o’clock when I’d go into the city and get my ass kicked. Life can be strange. – Duffy

Though the situation part-time social worker, part-time professional boxing sparring partner Duffy Dombrowski finds himself in starts out merely strange, things quickly elevate to downright life threatening in The Vegas Knockout, author Tom Schreck’s fourth entry in the Duffy Dombrowski series.

When Duffy gets a chance to go to Vegas and serve as the sparring partner for Russian heavyweight Boris Rusakov it’s the opportunity of a lifetime. After creatively figuring out how to ditch the two week seminar he’s supposed to be attending for his social worker job, Duffy heads to Vegas with his sidekick, basset hound Al, in tow.

Instead of staying at a glamorous location on The Strip and working in first-class conditions, however, Duffy finds himself quartered at a brothel on the outskirts of town and subjected to lopsided and dirty sparring techniques. Still, he’s getting paid well and it is Vegas.

But when Boris and his crew attempt to “promote” a worker at the brothel from maid to prostitute against her will Duffy isn’t about to ignore the matter and puts a stop to things. Permanently. And that’s when it gets really ugly. Boris’s connections in the Russian mob don’t take kindly to Duffy’s interference, and make it their mission in life to make sure Duffy understands that. Permanently. →

May 22, 2012

Bad Fight Scenes by Tom Schreck

I’m very pleased to welcome author and boxing aficionado/official Tom Schreck to the blog today to set a few things straight about how fights go down in the real world. Hey, fiction is fiction, but it still wouldn’t hurt authors to play things a little closer to the truth when their characters go for the KO. And speaking of knockouts, tomorrow I’ll be reviewing Tom’s latest Duffy Dombrowski novel, The Vegas Knockout.

Bad Fight Scenes by Tom Schreck I make part of my living evaluating fights. I’m a pro boxing judge with the World Boxing Association and I do world title fights. I’m also still a gym rat who crawls between the ropes to mix it up with other guys who have made equally ill-advised decisions on how to spend free time. Before I got into boxing I was a black belt Tae Kwon Do instructor.

I also write the Duffy Dombrowski mysteries that feature a run-of-the-mill pro boxer who works as a social worker during the day. He has a few more wins than losses, but almost every time the caliber of his opponents is stepped up he gets beat.

Like most writers I’m an avid mystery reader. I’m okay with the whole willing suspension of disbelief thing but really bad fight scenes bother me. Just like a gun guy would hate to read something about the wrong cartridge going into the wrong type of gun (I’m not a gun guy), I bristle when I come across authors that just don’t get how fights go. What to they do that’s wrong? →

May 18, 2012

Last Call for the Living by Peter Farris

Brothers will come lookin’ for me because I jumped on this one. Got greedy. Ye don’t just walk away from jumpin’ a score. – Hobe Hicklin

Fresh out of prison after a long stretch, what’s the first thing up on ex-con Hobe Hicklin’s ‘To Do’ list? Rob his hometown North Georgia Savings and Loan, of course. In and out in under 3 minutes with the cash, as robberies go this one goes pretty smoothly.

Well, except for killing the bank manager. Probably shouldn’t have taken the teller hostage either. Oh, and considering the job was planned with his fellow Aryan Brotherhood members while he was inside, Hicklin probably should have waited for them instead of jumping the score.

Now not only does Hicklin have local Sheriff Tommy Lang and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation on his ass, he has some very seriously pissed off Brotherhood members gunning for him as well. On top of which, Hicklin’s got to juggle his tweaking junkie girlfriend, Hummingbird, and that skittish mama’s boy of a teller, Charlie Colquitt.

Come to think of it, maybe that score didn’t go so smoothly after all. And it’s a good thing for readers it didn’t, because author Peter Farris’s debut Last Call for the Living is an intensely engaging exploration of the aftermath of a robbery which initially seems to have gone right, only to be revealed as having gone gloriously wrong in virtually every way possible. →

May 17, 2012

Robbing a Bank with Peter Farris

Already well-known to people in the crime fiction community, author Peter Farris is making big waves with his debut novel Last Call for the Living (May 22 from Forge). Today I am incredibly pleased to welcome my fellow Georgian and Mastodon fan to the blog for a guest post about a topic near and dear to his heart… robbing banks.

Peter Farris The following is the transcript of a conversation I had with a woman we’ll call Joanna Doe, a Teller Manager in the Atlanta metropolitan area.

PF: ———, first I want to thank you for agreeing to speak with me. I figured for sure you’d hang up once I told you the subject of this interview.

JD: Not at all. I think it’s so cool your book is finally coming out. I remember you talking about it all those years ago when we worked together.

PF: Don’t remind me. So how long have you been with the bank?

JD: Almost eighteen years.

PF: And how many robberies have you witnessed?

JD: Nineteen.

PF: That seems like a lot?

JD: At the old branch I worked at, we got hit at least once a year. I think the bank finally got around to installing bulletproof glass across the teller line.

PF: Were any of the robberies violent?

JD: A few. I remember one from way back. It was the day before Thanksgiving. Two men forced the branch manager, myself, three tellers and two customers at gun point into the vault and locked us inside.

PF: I always thought of you as like a combat veteran when it came to retail banking. It’s one of the reasons I thought to call you, too. And who better to ask how to rob a bank than someone who spends forty hours a week inside one. →

May 16, 2012

Unspent Time by Graham Parke

“I’ve never been able to walk up to a person and take a bite out of them. It’s always seemed kind of, I don’t know, impolite.” – Don’t Look Over the Edge of the World

There’s no question that author Graham Parke doesn’t just march to the beat of his own drummer, dude’s jitterbugging to a full orchestra playing a tune only he can hear. Anyone who’s read his delightfully odd novel No Hope for Gomez! understands this.

Fortunately for readers Parke is able to channel that mysterious and magical music in his head into his writing. The twenty short stories contained in his collection Unspent Time are a perfect reflection of Parke’s unique brand of insanity, not to mention a great way to make his acquaintance if you’ve not already.

And to be sure, Parke oddities abound in Unspent Time. For example, did you realize that every license plate you see contains a hidden message of some sort? You would if you read “Goki Feng Ho,” which explains the ancient Chinese art of decoding license plates. And while calling an exterminator to investigate the paranormal goings on in your house normally wouldn’t seem like the best way to go about things, it makes perfect sense if, like the poor bloke in “The Hunted,” your house is indeed haunted… by rats. →

May 16, 2012

Women Writers Speak Across the Ages by Donna Fletcher Crow

I’m pleased to welcome for a guest post Donna Fletcher Crow, author of the Monastery Murders Mysteries.

Donna Fletcher Crow Felicity Howard, heroine of my Monastery Murders clerical mystery series, is a thoroughly modern American woman who has gone off— rather rashly as she does most things— to study theology in a monastery in Yorkshire. Felicity is determined to set the world right and has little time for learning the wisdom of the ages as her church history lecturer Father Antony keeps urging her to do.

But then in A Darkly Hidden Truth, book 2 in the series, her world starts to fall apart— her difficult mother shows up unexpectedly, she discovers the murdered body of a a good friend, and then Antony is abducted— and Felicity finds that sometimes the past can speak to today as events lead her to two women writers who hold places in history for “firsts.”

Julian of Norwich (1342-1416) became the first woman to write a book in English when she wrote an account of the 16 mystical “showings” she experienced of the love of God; and Margery Kempe (1373-1440) “wrote” the first autobiography in English, although she was illiterate, by dictating it.

Although both women had mystical visions and their life spans crossed— they actually met in an event Margery records— they lived far different lives, had far different personalities and wrote in vastly different styles: →

May 14, 2012

Launch Party For Unspent Time by Graham Parke

From Graham Parke, the award winning author of No Hope for Gomez!, comes a collection of impossible tales. Permeating the cracks between the past and the present is the realm of Unspent Time; time that was allotted but never spent. This is where we find the stories that could have been true.

Such as the story of little Kiala, whose aunt and caretaker disappears one day, leaving her as the sole Huntress to battle the giant octopi to feed her village. Or the revealing tale of Goki Feng Ho: the ancient Chinese art of decoding the meaning of car license plates. And the heartbreaking story of the man responsible for choosing the colors of the insides of your shoes. As he toils away in obscurity, his work impacts society in ways we’ll never fully comprehend. And let’s not forget the story behind Unspent Time itself, the metaphysical ramifications of which will leave the scientific community feeling mostly indifferent about it for decades to come. →

May 11, 2012

Russian Roulette by Mike Faricy

“I’ve been shot, blown up, chased, and assaulted in the past couple of weeks and I’d just as soon hedge my bets.” – Dev Haskell

To say St. Paul, Minnesota private investigator Devlin ‘Dev’ Haskell is having a bit of a rough time with his most recent investigation would be putting it lightly. Of course, considering Dev has a habit of leaping before looking, especially when there are long legs and a pretty face involved, it’s not really too surprising he’s found himself in over his head.

The particular case/pretty face causing Dev problems in Russian Roulette belong to a gorgeous French woman named Kerri, who tracked Dev down at his office – aka The Spot Bar – and hired him to find her missing sister, Nikki. Except, as Dev starts poking around it quickly becomes apparent Kerri is not French, she’s Russian, the two women aren’t sisters, and Dev’s not the only one looking for Nikki… the Russian mob wants her too.

And not only has Dev inadvertently stepped into the crosshairs of the Russian mob, he’s managed to step onto the toes of both local police and a Federal task force in the process. By the time the bullets start flying and car bombs exploding Dev doesn’t know which way is up or who he’d rather have more pissed off at him, Russian mob boss “Braco the Waco” and his buddy Tibor “The Butcher” Crvek or tight-assed career-minded FBI Agent Peters. Either way, Dev has his hands seriously full. →

May 10, 2012

Fast Friends by Dianne Emley

You’re probably familiar with LA Times bestselling author Dianne Emley’s outstanding Detective Nan Vining thrillers, but did you know that before there was Nan there was Iris? Emley first entered the writing scene in the 90s (under the name Dianne G. Pugh) with a mystery series featuring investment counselor Iris Thorne. That series is now being reissued, both in paperback and ebook formats.

Dianne Emley “Some situations you just need to deal with. Walk through the fire, you know?” – Paula DeLacey

Having grown up in East LA the daughter of a handyman, Iris Thorne has worked with dogged determination and ruthless intensity to rise to the position of senior investment counselor at the brokerage firm of McKinney Alitzer in downtown Los Angeles. She’s come a long way from her blue-collar past and doesn’t think much about it anymore.

Until the Northridge earthquake hits and reminds Iris of the earthquake that occurred back when she was 14 years old. The quake, combined with a strange, urgent phone message from Dolly DeLacey, the mother of her childhood best friend, dredges up memories Iris had thought long since buried.

Back in 1971 the man who owned the land where Iris and her family lived was murdered. It was thought that a cousin committed the crime, but that was based almost exclusively on the testimony of the dead man’s son-in-law, Bill DeLacey. During the apprehension of the suspected killer the police got a little overzealous and beat the man, a Mexican immigrant, so severely he ended up dying. Iris secretly witnessed the beating, but when she told her mother about it her mother instructed Iris never to speak of it again. And for twenty-three years, she didn’t. →

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