Trust Your Eyes

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Ed McBain

"Downtown" starts on Christmas Eve as Florida orange grower Michael Barnes, in New York on business, runs afoul of bogus cops, thieves, the mob, and a slimy movie producer. McBain piles on the action and absurdity at a furious pace as Barnes sinks deeper and deeper into the worst New York has to offer. McBain has always been adept at infusing his hard-boiled fiction with a sardonic humor that borders on the ludicrous. In "Downtown," he proves he can still walk that tightrope as he balances the hilarity of Barnes' situation with a lean, hard-hitting narrative style. In fact, McBain's humor is so deliberately distracting, you don't realize it when he turns deadly serious. Michael Barnes may be bounced from one jam to another, but he too has a dark side, like most McBain characters. When pushed enough, he too becomes as deadly as his foes and as hard-boiled as any Raymond Chandler creation. "Downtown" is another example of Ed McBain at his best. Highly recommended.

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William Lashner

E-Book Extra: On Writing: An Interview with William LashnerAuthor of the acclaimed novels Fatal Flaw, Bitter Truth, and Hostile Witness, bestselling writer William Lashner crafts dark, witty, engrossing tales of suspense involving one of the most intriguing characters of modern popular fiction: Victor Carl.A defense attorney who lives his life in shades of gray, Victor Carl fights all the right fights for all the wrong reasons. With a failing legal practice, a dead-end love life, a pile of unpaid traffic tickets, and a talent for mixing it up in tough working-class bars and sparring with obstinate cops, Victor skates on the razor's edge of legal ethics in search of the easy buck. But the one absolute in Victor's life is loyalty, especially to a client -- even if he happens to be dead. Like Joey Cheaps, a no-account who takes a knife to the throat down on the waterfront, but not before he shares with his lawyer his part in a terrible crime.With his client murdered, Victor must search for a killer. But solving the crime means investigating the darkest spot in Joey Cheaps's misspent youth, sending Victor on a twisting journey that leads to a missing suitcase stuffed with money, photographs of a mysterious naked woman, and a Supreme Court justice with a secret to hide. And most dangerous of all, Victor steps into the crosshairs of a vengeful enemy with a past full of pain and a taste for blood.As thrilling as it is darkly evocative, Past Due is a superb tale of crime and justice that takes the intrepid Victor Carl into brilliant new territory and confirms William Lashner's place among the top suspense writers of our time.

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Walter Mosley

The New York Times Book Review ended its rave for White Butterfly, the most recent novel in Walter Mosley's acclaimed mystery series, by saying "I can't wait to see where Easy Rawlins turns up next. And when." Black Betty holds the sure-to-be-bestselling answer. The place is Los Angeles. The year is 1961, the dawn of a hopeful era for America's black citizens. Easy Rawlins's quiet real-estate empire is deep in the hole, so he must accept $200 from the oily white private eye Saul Lynx to track down one Elizabeth Eady, aka "Black Betty." From her native Houston's Fifth Ward to her position as housekeeper for the immensely wealthy Cain family of Beverly Hills, Betty's stunning beauty and raw sensuality have left a trail of chaos and mayhem in her wake. To compound Easy's troubles, his murderous sidekick Mouse is due out of jail, and he has bloody revenge on his mind. Entertainment Weekly has said that "[Easy] Rawlins isn't just the best new series detective around, he might be the best American character to appear in quite some time." Easy's murder-strewn search for "Black Betty" takes him into the depths of America's racial dilemmas and the mysteries of human character - and his creator, Walter Mosley, to even greater heights of achievement in the American novel. It is that rare novel that tells a gripping, fast-paced story while it grapples with the biggest questions that haunt American life.

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Nuruddin Farah

Returning to Mogadishu, Somalia, from New York after a twenty-year exile, Jeebleh finds a troubled and devastated city ruled by clan warlords and patrolled by violent gangs of thugs.