“Upon this blasted heath you stop our way
With such prophetic greeting? Publish ebooks, I charge you.” — Macbeth
Across the blasted heath of the crime fiction community a phrase has been uttered and passed on from one to the next to the other. If you listen closely you can hear the whispered legacy passed from The Bard to Allan Guthrie and Kyle MacRae and now to you. “01.11.11 11.01″ is the password but it’s no secret.
On November 1st the new ebook publisher Blasted Heath will launch with five books:
Dead Money – by Ray Banks
Double-glazing salesman Alan Slater is in trouble. He hasn’t had a good sales lead in months. His wife rightly suspects him of playing around. His best mate Les Beale has turned into a bigoted, boozed-up headcase. And that’s the least of it.
When a rigged poker game has fatal consequences, Alan finds himself not only responsible for the clean-up, but also for Beale’s escalating debt to a man who won’t take “broke” for an answer. As Beale’s life spirals out of control, he becomes ever more desperately reliant on Alan to save his skin.
But Alan isn’t about to be dragged into the gutter by anyone, least of all his badbeat, dead money former mate.
After all, there’s no such thing as a compassionate double-glazing salesman.
All The Young Warriors – by Anthony Neil Smith
When two of the Twin Cities’ “Lost Boys” — young Somali men drafted to fight for terrorists back in the homeland — kill a pair of cops on his home turf, detective Ray Bleeker is left devastated. One of the dead cops was his girlfriend.
The investigation grinds to a halt when he discovers that the young murderers have fled to Somalia to fight in the rebel army. He’s at his wits’ end when the father of one of the boys, an ex-gang leader named Mustafa, comes looking for answers, wanting to clear his son’s name and refusing to take no for an answer.
Bleeker and Mustafa form an uneasy alliance, teaming up to help bring the boys back home to stand trial. But little do they know what Somalia has in store for them.
Murder, warfare, piracy, love, betrayal and revenge. All the Young Warriors is an epic thriller that will have you whiteknuckling your eReader all through the night.
The Man In The Seventh Row – by Brian Pendreigh
What happened that turned one man’s world inside out?
Roy is a film fan. He loves the cinema. Maybe he loves the cinema a little too much. Lately, things have been going wrong. He settles into his favourite seat to watch an old movie, but he’s not seeing what he expects to see. No matter the film – The Graduate, Brief Encounter, The Magnificent Seven – he finds himself sucked from his seventh-row seat into the heart of the action on the big screen.
Roy’s everywhere. Playing lead roles in dozens of classic movies. A fantasy come true? Or a living nightmare?
The Long Midnight Of Barney Thomson – by Douglas Lindsay
Barney Thomson — awkward, diffident, Glasgow barber — lives a life of desperate mediocrity. Shunned at work and at home, unable to break out of a twenty-year rut, each dull day blends seamlessly into the next.
However, there is no life so tedious that it cannot be spiced up by inadvertent murder, a deranged psychopath, and a freezer full of neatly packaged meat.
Barney Thomson’s uninteresting life is about to go from 0 to 60 in five seconds, as he enters the grotesque and comically absurd world of the serial killer…
Phase Four – by Gary Carson
On a remote desert highway in Nevada, a classified military convoy transporting nerve gas for incineration is hijacked by a group of Middle Eastern terrorists.
In San Francisco, Homeland Security investigator Matthew Drake is assigned to put one of the suspects under surveillance. But when the gas is released inside a luxury high-rise hotel in an apparent attempt to assassinate the President, Drake realizes – too late – that the hijackers weren’t terrorists, the convoy wasn’t carrying nerve gas and that something is very wrong in Washington D.C.
Now mobs are rioting in the Bay Area – fighting among themselves, jumping out of windows, creating utter chaos. And it’s spreading across California at a frightening speed, threatening to engulf the entire country.
Hunted by professional killers who seem to be working for his own employers, Drake finds himself on the run with disgraced CIA surveillance technician Gena Hahn, but he’s not sure which side she’s on. Locked up in a FEMA camp as the United States descends into madness, held prisoner in a secret Continuity of Government facility miles under the Utah desert, they struggle to survive a conspiracy gone wrong – a sinister plan to achieve total control over the human mind.
Ray Banks and Anthony Neil Smith are longtime Spinetingler favorites. Gary Carson wrote one of my all-time favorite online short stories, “Black Sun” from Thuglit. I haven’t yet read Brian Pendreigh and Barney Thomson but look forward to the introduction.
With Blasted Heath set to launch soon and Bare Knuckles Press coming along soon after I still believe that 2011 is the year of the epublisher.
Upcoming releases from Blasted Heath will include Wee Rockets by Gerard Brennan, Ray Banks’ entire Cal Innes series in ebook form in the US and UK and the debut novel of former Spinetingler HQ house guest Damien Seaman.
Blasted Heath intro video from Blether Video on Vimeo.
Here is Anthony Neil Smith reading a bit from All the Young Warriors
