After the jump check out the February 2011 releases that I’m looking forward to reading.
How about you, what are you looking forward to?
Noche Roja by Simon Oliver from Vertigo (don’t have)
In the tradition of Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, writer Simon Oliver explores a hidden world of corruption where money, sex, politics and crime all add up to the same thing.
In the desert just south of the border, young women are turning up murdered. No suspects. No clues. And authorities seem uninterested in uncovering any. When ex-private eye Jack Cohen is hired to find one missing girl, he is drawn back into the shadow world between North and South. And there, he must face the terrible tragedy in his past that he’s been running from all these years. Featuring the gritty, stylized artwork of Jason Latour, NOCHE ROJA is an gripping noir tale of how the insatiable craving for cheap consumer goods leads to the ultimate cheapening of life itself.
The Terror of Living by Urban Waite from Little, Brown and Company (have)
Phil Hunt is in deep trouble.
Hunt is on the run from two men: Drake, the deputy sheriff who intends to catch him, and Grady, the vicious hitman who means to kill him.
For twenty years Hunt has lived in Washington State, raising horses with his wife on his small farm. He’s tried to stay out of trouble, wanting only to make a living and taking the occasional illicit job in order to do so.
Then his last delivery goes horribly wrong, and the chase is on from the mountains down into the Puget lowlands. To have any chance of rescuing his quiet life, Hunt will have to deal with deputy sheriff Bobby Drake, a good man determined to make up for his father’s tainted legacy and Grady Fisher, a very bad man intent on making a name for himself in the most violent ways. With a fondness for blood, Grady takes pleasure in the use of knives, taking Hunt’s life apart piece by piece, all the while leaving a trail of victims across the state.
Relentless and gorgeously written, with original characters and a vividly powerful sense of place, The Terror of Living heralds the arrival of a writer who will be compared with the great suspense novelists.
One True Sentence by Craig McDonald from Minotaur Books (have)
Paris, 1924. A city teeming with would-be poets, writers, and painters. Hector Lassiter, fledgling author and best friend of Ernest Hemingway, is crossing the Pont Neuf when he hears a body fall into the icy Seine — the first in a string of brutal murders of literary magazine editors that throw a shroud over the City of Light.
Frantic to stop the killings, Gertrude Stein gathers the most prominent crime and mystery writers in the city, including Hector and the dark, mysterious crime novelist Brinke Devlin. Soon, Hector and Brinke are tangled not only under the sheets, but in a web of murders, each more grisly than the next.
As he is drawn deeper into the hunt, Hector finds himself torn between three women with hidden agendas and dark imaginations. When Hector learns that the murders may be the work of a strange cult of writers who are targeting the literary set, Hemingway, Hector, and Brinke must scramble to find the killer before they become the next victims.
A Moveable Feast meets The Dante Club in this exquisite mystery that takes readers from the cafés of Montparnasse, through the historic graveyards of Paris, to the smoky backrooms of bookstores and salons. As dark as the shadowy banks of the Seine and as addictive as absinthe, this unforgettable book will grab you and never let go.
The Shortcut Man by pg Sturgess from Scribner (don’t have)
In the City of Angels, not everyone plays by the rules. When people need a problem fixed fast, and discreetly, they call Dick Henry. Henry is known as a “shortcut man,” someone who believes that the shortest answer to many problems may not always be legal. As he cuts through the red tape for his clients, who range from an elderly woman ripped off by shady contractors to a landlord with a tenant many months behind on the rent, Henry always gets the job done, no matter what the cost. In Shortcut Man, Henry spends his days hunting down slimy con men and his nights seducing Lynette, an intoxicating, long-legged vixen. But when Henry gets an assignment from porn producer Artie Benjamin, his life suddenly becomes much more complicated. Now Henry must complete the job, avoid being killed, and somehow figure out what to do with Lynette. Filled with dark comedy, whip-smart writing, and a memorable cast of characters, Shortcut Man evokes Chandler and Hammett—hard-boiled crime at its best—and is an exciting beginning to a crackling new series.
I’ve been wanting to read The Terror of Living by Urban Waite.
I’m salivating over ONE TRUE SENTENCE.
Yeah, I’m looking forward to digging into both of them.