JANUARY 2018 - ADDITIONS TO THE LIBRARY - SIX OF THE BEST!

Here's another dirty half dozen added to the collection last month - there were more than that, but I'm only shouting about these ones.....

Dan Ames - Sugar (2018) - Amazon purchase

Wade Carver is a dangerous man. So when a shady lawyer needs to find a boat filled with extremely valuable - and highly illegal - cargo, she hires Carver. Unfortunately, he's not the only who's been hired to do a risky job. A powerful drug dealer has targeted Carver for elimination, and offered a steep contract to any killer who can execute...the job. When Carver investigates the missing boat, the case takes him on a collision course with his search for his missing sister. The action is hot and heavy, just like the Florida sun.

"Ames is a sensation among Kindle readers who love fast-paced thrillers." -MysteryTribune

Chris Orlet - In the Pines (2016)

"Ames is a sensation among Kindle readers who love fast-paced thrillers." -MysteryTribune
"Chris Orlet's debut novel (In the Pines/New Pulp Press) is what I've been waiting for for years. Finally a worthy successor to James Crumley and Newton Thornburg and Kem Nunn, the 1970s godfathers of true noir's long-needed revival. His characters are, by and large, unscrupulous in the way they live. They're broken and their morals have been watered down by bad choices and unalterable circumstance, but the reader can't help but feel he's only a few bad days from taking permanent residence in the hopeless world they populate."

Jonathan Ashley, author of South of Cincinnati, Out of Mercy and The Cost of Doing Business

Emily Ahrens is dead. Just how she died, no one is quite sure.

Authorities eventually confirm that the young woman died of arsenic poisoning. But a coroner's inquest, called to decide whether the death was suicide, accident, homicide, natural or undetermined concludes that the death is undetermined.

With no evidence of foul play, local authorities are reluctant to investigate. The girl's father, however, refuses to let the matter die and begins obsessively seeking answers, even as the town seeks to put the tragedy behind them.

Stonewalled, the father hires a shady private investigator from a nearby city to look into the circumstances of his daughter's death. When he, too, fails to turn up any answers, the desperate father turns up the screws on one rather unsavory suspect, a fatal accident ensues, and circumstances begin to spiral out of control.

In the great tradition of Noir fiction, In the Pines is a tale like nothing you've read before.

Ronald Colby - Night Driver (2018) - copy from publisher

So this was it, he thought. He had his first fare and was now officially a cab driver. He shook his head as he exhaled the smoke into the morning cold. Well, he’d use the taxi time just as he had promised himself. He would figure things out, get a hold on himself, keep a little money coming in, and find the men who had murdered his wife.

Nick Cullen's wife was brutally murdered in a burglary gone horribly wrong, and he's not the type to move on with his life, especially when he has seen the faces of the murderers in person. His plan: learn how to drive a cab so he can find his wife's murderers on the streets of Los Angeles.

Nick's nighttime rides lead him down dead end after dead end, until one day he manages to get a hold of the ID of one of the men who destroyed his life. Nick's chase heats up and he's forced to face the truth of how far a man will go who has nothing left to lose.

Night Driver takes the reader on a white-knuckled thrill ride through the dimly lit streets of after-hours Los Angeles and into the dark heart of a man pushed to the brink. An unforgettable journey of obsession, sadness, and revenge.

Patricia Skalka - Death Rides the Ferry (2018) - review copy from Edelweiss site

It's a sparkling August day on Washington Island and the resonant notes of stringed instruments float on the breeze toward sailboats and the approaching ferry. After a forty-year absence, the Viola da Gamba Festival has returned to the picturesque isle on the tip of Wisconsin's Door County peninsula. Sheriff Dave Cubiak enjoys a rare day off as tourists and a documentary film crew hover around the musicians.The jubilant mood sours when the ferry arrives and an unidentified passenger is found dead. Long-time residents recall with dismay the disastrous festival decades earlier, when another woman died and a valuable sixteenth-century instrument-the fabled yellow viol-vanished, never to be found.Cubiak follows a trail of murder, kidnapping, and false identity that leads back to the calamitous night of the twin tragedies. With the lives of those he holds most dear in peril, the sheriff pursues a ruthless killer into the stormy northern reaches of Lake Michigan.

Ed Lynskey - Wrong Orbits (2015) - Amazon purchase

 Loomis McTeague has good reasons to fear his safe, little world in suburbia is skidding into a wrong orbit. His best friend Stu O'Fryer is involved in a disgusting criminal enterprise. Loomis suspects his wife Enola Jo is cheating on him. His new co-worker Zoey, actually a con artist, is blackmailing him with the compromising photos taken during their tryst. Loomis does his best to hold things together. But nothing he tries seems to work out. He finds a resolution of a sort, but at what cost? Wrong Orbits is a modern crime noir written much like Ed Lynskey's other well-received suburban crime noirs Ask the Dice and Blood Diamonds. JT Lindroos, who designed the front cover for The Blue Cheer (Pointblank, 2007) , also did this spiffy front cover.

T.M. Logan - 29 Seconds (2018) - copy from publisher

The sensational new page-turning thriller from the number 1 bestselling author of LIES. Perfect for fans of FRIEND REQUEST by Laura Marshall and I AM WATCHING YOU by Tessa Driscoll.

Give me one name. One person. And I will make them disappear . . .

When Sarah rescues a young girl in trouble, she expects nothing in return. But her act of bravery puts a powerful and dangerous man in her debt. He lives by his own brutal code, and all debts must be repaid - in the only way he knows how.

He offers Sarah a way to solve a desperate situation with her intolerable boss. A once-in-a-lifetime deal that will make all her problems disappear.

No consequences. No comeback. No chance of being found out.

All it takes is a 29 second phone call.

BECAUSE EVERYONE HAS A NAME TO GIVE. DON'T THEY?

Praise for T. M. Logan, the master of the everyman thriller

'Assured, compelling, and hypnotically readable - with a twist at the end I guarantee you won't see coming' Lee Child