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September 05, 2010

Contest: Win an Autographed Copy of
Dead Matter by Anton Strout

When the paranormal raises its otherworldy head in New York City, the Department of Extraordinary Affairs executes a flawless, stick-the-landing smackdown. That’s the idea anyway, and Agent Simon Canderous can usually count on help from his mentor, Connor Christos.

But Connor’s left Simon to handle a double case load as he cashes in on five years worth of saved vacation time. Simon suspects that Connor isn’t Club Medding so much as Club Deading it up—investigating the disappearance of his long lost brother.

Simon especially needs Connor when the spirit populace of Manhattan is shaken and stirred by someone intruding on their well-deserved R.I.P. But Connor’s relentless ghost whispering has sent him off the deep end; he’s haunted every night by visions of his brother’s ghost at his window.

Simon’s partner may be going crazy—or worse, maybe he’s not…

– Win an Autographed Copy of “Dead Matter” –

Dead Matter is book three in the continuing adventures of Simon Canderous, following Dead to Me and Deader Still. I have an autographed copy of Dead Matter to give away to one of my readers.

To be entered, just leave a comment below. Please include your email address or url so I can contact the winner. Contest open to US/Canada and runs through September 10, 2010.
*** The contest is now closed.***

Anton Strout was born in the Berkshire Hills mere miles from writing heavyweights Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville and currently lives in New Jersey. In his scant spare time, his is a writer, a sometimes actor, sometimes musician, occasional RPGer. He currently works in publishing. To learn more about Anton, visit his website.

August 20, 2010

“My Life as a Book 2010”

Ok, you can blame this one on PopCultureNerd from Twitter. She has come up with a very clever meme in which you describe yourself by completing a set of sentences using only the titles of books you’ve read in 2010.

So, without further ado, here is “My Life as a Book 2010” using only titles I’ve read in this calendar year to date… I didn’t even cheat by going into my TBR list!

In high school I was: The Girl Who Played With Fire (Stieg Larsson)

People might be surprised: I Am Not A Serial Killer (Dan Wells)

I will never be: The Insider (Reece Hirsch)

My fantasy job is: The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death (Charlie Huston)

At the end of a long day I need: Exit Strategy (Michael Wiecek)

I hate it when: The Lizard’s Bite (David Hewson)

Wish I had: The Villa of Mysteries (David Hewson)

My family reunions are: A Thousand Cuts (Simon Lelic)

At a party you’d find me with: The Cutting Crew (Steve Mosby)

Beat the Reaper I’ve never been to: Jar City (Arnaldur Indridason)

A happy day includes: Catching Fire (Suzanne Collins)

Motto I live by: Beat The Reaper (Josh Bazell)

On my bucket list: Me Talk Pretty One Day (David Sedaris)

In my next life, I want to be: The Lock Artist (Steve Hamilton)

Next year I’ll know better to read more books with versatile, clever titles. 😉

You can check out PopCultureNerd’s list here. And if you’re feeling brave enough to play I’d love to see your lists too. If you don’t have enough 2010 titles you can fudge a little and include books from 2009 as well.

August 19, 2010

Maps of Hell by Paul Johnston

If there was one thing I had learned in the U.S., it was the benefit of nailing your enemies before they nailed you. – Matt Wells

In Maps of Hell, British crime writer Matt Wells initially has a bigger problem on his hands than nailing his enemies… he has to figure out who he is first.

The book opens with Matt regaining consciousness in a tiny cell, naked, beaten and unable to recall who he is or how he got there. He’s taken from his cell repeatedly for bizarre, Clockwork Orange-esque sessions aimed at conditioning his mind… but to what end? Matt doesn’t want to stick around long enough to find out.

Taking advantage of a lapse in one of the sessions he makes a daring escape, during which he realizes that he – and many others – are being held and experimented on by a fringe militia group at a compound deep in the forests of Maine. His memory slowly returns while he’s on the run trying desperately to stay one step ahead of his militia pursuers. And they aren’t the only ones looking for him.

A series of gruesome murders have been occurring in Washington, D.C., with Matt’s fingerprints turning up at one of the crime scenes. If that wasn’t bad enough, he’s also wanted for questioning in the disappearance of his girlfriend, British DCI Karen Oaten, who was in D.C. to meet with the Department of Justice.

Now, in addition to trying to stay one step ahead of the militia members tracking him, Matt also has to decide whether to go to the authorities and trust them to believe his story, or try on his own to solve the puzzle of his abduction, his girlfriend’s disappearance, and why he’s being framed for murder.

Maps of Hell is a truly frantic and engaging read. It is decidedly unnerving to be thrust into a world where the narrator, normally the reader’s guide, himself doesn’t know precisely what’s going on. And author Paul Johnston has captured Matt’s fear and confusion in a way that’s so vivid it’s almost palpable:

When I came round, I didn’t have a clue where I was. My head was ringing with strange sounds and I saw a blur of colors and shapes. Gradually my vision cleared, but my ears were still filled with discordant voices. There was a foul stench in my nostrils. I tried to move, but my arms and legs were confined. I looked down and saw that I had been tied to a wheelchair. I was wearing paper clothes again. I felt a twinge of alarm and glanced around. What I saw wasn’t reassuring.

Having read the previous two books in the Matt Wells series is not required in order to enjoy Maps of Hell. In fact, not having done so could arguably enhance the experience

August 16, 2010

Live To Tell by Lisa Gardner

Live To Tell by Lisa Gardner These things happen, though. Not all at once. But bit by bit, moment by moment, choice by choice. There are pieces of yourself that once you give away, you can never get back again. – Victoria Oliver

Live To Tell, the fourth novel by Lisa Gardner featuring Boston PD detective D. D. Warren, opens with Warren being called out to the scene of a horrific mass murder; an entire family is dead, the wife and three kids apparently killed by the husband before he shot himself in the head.

Something about the case doesn’t feel quite right to Warren, but before she can identify what it is another family is killed, also in an apparent mass murder-suicide scenario. This time, however, the autopsy is conclusive: the husband was dead before the supposed self-inflicted gunshot was fired. Someone else killed these families.

Warren’s quest to find out who really committed the brutal murders and how – if at all – they were connected leads her to a pediatric psych ward that specializes in mentally unbalanced children who’ve displayed violence toward themselves or others.

Turns out both families had a child who had spent time there. Yet, in both cases the violent child was one of the murder victims, so what other connection could there be? →

August 12, 2010

Scar Tissue: Seven Stories About Love and Wounds by Marcus Sakey

Scar Tissue by Marcus Sakey From the bestselling author of The Blade Itself and Good People comes an anthology of short stories, Scar Tissue: Seven Stories About Love and Wounds.

“The Desert Here and the Desert Far Away”
“The Days When You Were Anything Else”
“No One”
“Gravity and Need”
“As Breathing”
“Cobalt”
“The Time Before the Last”

Featuring both award-winners and previously unpublished works, these tales of men and women pushed to–and beyond–the ragged edge demonstrate why National Public Radio declared Marcus Sakey writes “crime drama for the 21st century.”

Scar Tissue is available exclusively as an ebook. Kindle users can download the entire anthology on Amazon, and everyone else can get it at Smashwords.

– GET A FREE SHORT STORY –

Marcus has been kind enough to give everyone a sneak peek at the anthology by offering one of the short stories from it FREE. To get the free short story just use this link, add the story to your cart, and put in the following code at checkout: YB98Q

Enjoy!

Marcus Sakey is the author of The Blade Itself (a thriller Publishers Weekly called “brilliant…a must read”), Good People, and The Amateurs. To research his books he’s shadowed homicide detectives, toured the morgue, gone shooting with Special Forces soldiers, ridden with gang cops, and learned to pick a deadbolt. Born in Flint, Michigan, he now lives in Chicago with his wife. To learn more about Marcus, visit his website.

August 11, 2010

Mask of the Betrayer by Sharon Donovan

Mask of the Betrayer by Sharon Donovan “Truth be told, I took it as a sign of betrayal. And betrayal in my life is unforgivable, something I simply won’t tolerate.” – Michael DeVeccio

As Chicago art curator Margot Montgomery comes to realize in Sharon Donovan’s debut, Mask of the Betrayer, Michael DeVeccio is deadly serious about not tolerating betrayal. Trained from a young age by his uncle to be the ultimate killing machine, DeVeccio also happens to be a dashingly handsome billionaire “with the face of a fallen angel,” which makes for a dangerous combination.

Swept off her feet by DeVeccio in a whirlwind romance, Margot marries him and moves into his fortress-like mansion in the foothills of Red Rock Canyon. And while it is somewhere she should feel safe, there is a killer stalking Red Rock, one who is targeting people close to DeVeccio. Only after she’s in too deep does Margot fully realize just what she’s gotten into, and that the killer is closer than she could ever have imagined.

Her only hope at getting out alive comes in the form of cop Diego Santiago. Having worked a case similar to the current murders ten years prior, Santiago is convinced they are the work of the same killer; one who was never caught, and who Santiago believes to be Michael DeVeccio. →

August 09, 2010

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon “There’s no place on earth with more of the old superstitions and magic mixed into its daily life than the Scottish Highlands.” – Frank Randall

As the story goes, author Diana Gabaldon’s first editor once said, “These have to be word-of-mouth books because they’re too weird to describe to anybody.” I don’t know that ‘weird’ is quite the right word – I’d prefer ambitious – but there is no question that Outlander is a genre-bending literary trip unlike anything I’ve ever read before.

The book opens in 1945 with former WWII combat nurse Claire Randall and her academic husband, Frank, on a second honeymoon in Scotland. Having been separated for three years by the war, Claire and Frank are quite eager to rediscover each other and begin a family. What Claire discovers, however, is something she could never have imagined.

While out strolling in the countryside one afternoon she comes across an ancient stone circle. As she wanders through it she feels a distinct sense of displacement and unease and, upon regaining her bearings, realizes she’s no longer in 1940s Scotland. She has, in fact, been transported back to the war-torn Scottish Highlands of the mid 1700s. →

August 06, 2010

‘The Worst Thing in the World’ by Steve Mosby

I’m very pleased to have a guest post from Steve to wrap up Steve Mosby Week. I’ll just let him get to it…

Steve Mosby I’ve been thinking about dead people recently. More specifically, dead women.

That’s not as weird or wrong as it sounds. I’m a crime writer, after all, so it’s natural for dead women to crop up. And these are fictional dead women, not real ones. The victims of murder – and worse – that cross my mind are pretty much always made-up, so it’s a harmless process: I think about this stuff; I write it down; and someone eventually reads it (cough cough). Nobody in the real world actually gets hurt.

But I’ve been thinking about the subject more than I normally do, for a few reasons. It started a couple of months back, during a conversation with another writer, who mentioned that my writing often contain ‘dead girlfriends’. Guilty as charged. As it happens, it’s even worse than that. I started out doing short stories, and even then I was well aware of my unfortunate tendency to include dead girlfriends. That was before I started writing my first book, so I should have known better, and yet The Third Person happened anyway.

Okay, it has a missing girlfriend rather than a dead one, but that’s the slimmest of technicalities and, from a narrative standpoint, they do exactly the same job. In a leap of unbridled creative genius, The Cutting Crew has an estranged wife rather than a dead one. Go, me. Except don’t go too far, because the story’s driven by an anonymous dead girl that haunts the main character. Next, in The 50/50 Killer, there’s simply a very obvious dead girlfriend. It’s shameless. Let’s just move on quickly … to Cry For Help, in which the whole concept is based around dead girlfriends. Now, at this point you might be wondering what the hell is wrong with me (I am), and we haven’t even got to Still Bleeding, which begins with the suicide of the main character’s wife. Jesus. Wept. →

August 05, 2010

The 50/50 Killer by Steve Mosby

The final review of Steve Mosby Week is of The 50/50 Killer. Even though it’s not Steve’s most recent release (that’d be Still Bleeding), I saved The 50/50 Killer for the final review because it was the first book of Steve’s I read, and as such will always be my favorite for having been my gateway into Mosby’s world.

The 50/50 Killer by Steve Mosby As any experienced officer will tell you, there is always room for instinct. As the years pass, you develop a finely tuned inner voice that you learn to listen to even when others cannot hear it. And, within reason, there is no harm in following this voice where it takes you. – From Damage Done, by John Mercer

Detective Sergeant John Mercer has made himself a legend in the police force by following his inner voice. Doing so has resulted in the capture of many killers, receipt of numerous professional accolades, and even a self-penned book based on his career.

Young officer Mark Nelson sees his new assignment to Mercer’s team as a tremendous opportunity, both for hands-on learning and as a way to advance his career. Little does he know he’s about to get the education of a lifetime.

Nelson has barely arrived for his first day at his new assignment when he and Mercer are called to a gruesome scene where a man has been found burned to death in his home.

The evidence indicates he was severely tortured before succumbing to his ultimate fate. Even more ominous, the evidence also suggests it’s the handiwork of a killer Mercer has seen before.

Known as the 50/50 Killer, his preferred method of madness is to stalk a couple, kidnap them, and then force them to choose which of them will die – after being slowly tortured – while the other is made to watch. He sees it as a game:

The killer’s game contained as many reversals as the participants could bear. The impetus for those changes was being forced to witness the suffering of the person they loved. The victims had never been blinded in both eyes, never punctured in both eardrums. They had always been able to see and hear.

The last time Mercer got dragged into the 50/50 Killer’s game the investigation ‘ended’ with the murder of a member of Mercer’s team, and Mercer having a nervous breakdown. The 50/50 Killer was not caught. →

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– GET A FREE SHORT STORY –

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