A universal tale of escape, love and redemption. A Boston fireman, in an attempt to flee personal and professional tragedy, accepts a job as a bartender on a Greek island. In an isolated cove, he meets Kerryn, an animal rights activist who believes dolphins possess consciousness, intelligence and souls. Kerryn enjoys an extraordinary and personal relationship with a dolphin and is waging a covert war to stop the local fishermen from using illegal nets that not only deplete the sea of fish but also take dolphins’ lives. The fireman is pulled into this conflict as his relationship with Kerryn deepens. But Kerryn’s passion and convictions lead her to make a fatal decision that changes the island and both their lives forever. The novel’s emotional landscape and its themes of environmentalism, animal rights, and the costs of capitalism make The Last Island both timely and timeless.

The Last Island

Literature & Fiction

Hogan, David

Contemporary

Betimes Books

Ana Torres is a Texas Ranger assigned to a dusty outpost to protect the border. When she discovers the body of a dead crosser, the stage is set for an investigation and a confrontation in the nighttime desert. Luis González lives on the Mexican side, helping those who seek a better life in the north while looking for peace in his own way. Marisol Herrera, a border crosser, braves hardship and dangers on her journey from the high mountains of El Salvador to the sun-blasted flats of the Mexico/Texas border. She is alone, chasing a dream, but threatened by the realities of la frontera. The stories of these three will intersect in the badlands of Texas. There will be death and pain and prices paid along the banks of the Rio Grande.

La Frontera

Hawken, Sam

Picturesque Killarney might seem the perfect place to enjoy the rare gift of sun but the town has got the blues. Bernard Dunphy, eccentric jarvey and guitarist, is pining for his unrequited love and has to contend with an ailing mother and an ailing horse. His troubled friend Jack gets embroiled in a violent crime. A trio of girlfriends becomes entangled in the terrible webs of their own making. The novel fluctuates between darkness and light as the protagonists struggle with their inner demons. Can friendship, love and music save their sinking souls?   “Colin O'Sullivan writes with a style and a swagger all his own. His voice - unique, strong, startlingly expressive - both comes from and adds to Ireland's long and lovely literary lineage. Like many of that island's sons and daughters, O'Sullivan sends language out on a gleeful spree, exuberant, defiant, ever-ready for a party. Only a soul of stone could resist joining in.” - Niall Griffiths

Killarney Blues

O’Sullivan, Colin

Reach the Shining River

Stevens, Kevin

“Central Park West Trilogy” includes three novels originally published separately and collected for the first time in a single volume. Postmodern fables, dark, shocking, perversely funny, wickedly astute, and compulsively readable, they share Kalich’s ferocious energy and unique vision. Together, they break down standard notions of plot, character and form a body of work that is distinctive and brilliant. "The Nihilesthete" (nominated for a Pen/Faulkner Award, The Hemingway Award, a National Book Award, and Pulitzer Prize) introduces us to Kalich’s dark world, where a spiritually desolate caseworker plays increasingly sadistic games with a limbless, speechless idiot with a painter’s eye. This enigmatic physically diminished esthete will reveal not only his true essence, but the very center of what it means to be human. "Penthouse F" is a cautionary tale that takes the form of an inquiry into the suicide—or murder?—of a young boy and girl in the Manhattan penthouse of a writer named Richard Kalich. Blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, kindness and cruelty, love and obsession, guilt and responsibility, writer and character, "Penthouse F" is a critical examination of an increasingly voyeuristic society, a metafiction where Kalich the writer, Kalich the person and Kalich the character all merge together, as the reader must pick through the confusion to discover the truth. "Charlie P" dispenses with a conventional narrative altogether, as we follow the comic misadventures of a singularly unique, comic and outlandish Everyman. At age three, when his father dies, he decides to overcome mortality by becoming immortal: by not living his life, he will live forever. Akin to other great American icons such as Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit and Forrest Gump, Charlie P, while asocial and alienated, is, at the same time, at the heart of the American dream. “Richard Kalich is after what it means to be profoundly out of step with one's culture yet still unwilling to let go of the American dream.” —Brian Evenson “Kalich is a successful novelist, one who has succeeded in consistently producing perplexing fictions that fail to categorize themselves and escape the warping influence of authorial intent.” —Electronic Book Review “Kalich represents the best in contemporary fiction. He has every chance to become—why not? —a living classical author.” —Hooligan Literary Magazine “The Nihilesthete is a brilliant, hammer-hitting, lights-out novel.” —Los Angeles Times “One of the most powerfully written books of the decade.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A tour de force... equals the best work of playwright Sam Shepard.” —Columbus Post-Dispatch “Penthouse F is akin to the best work of Paul Auster in terms of its readability without sacrificing its intelligence of experiment. […] Kalich delivers afresh, relevant, and enticingly readable work of metafiction.” —American Book Review “Ghosts haunt this book from first page to last: Dostoevsky, Mallarme, Kafka, Mann, Camus, Pessoa, Gombrowicz--and, oh yes, most perniciously of all, "Kalich.” —Warren Motte, World Literature Today “If one of the great European intransigents of the last century—say, Franz Kafka or Georges Bataille or Witold Gombrowicz—were around to write a novel about our era of reality TV and the precession of simulacra, the era of Big Brother and The Real World, what would it look like? Well, it might look like Richard Kalich’s Penthouse F…” —Brian McHale “With his continuous comic exaggeration, Kalich is able to describe, highly uniquely, the overwhelming, vertiginous, risky sensation of being alive.” —American Book Review “I would rather that the familiar be embraced and the novel resonate beyond itself and intone the spheres of Plato and Beckett. Charlie P resonates.” —Review of Contemporary Fiction

Central Park West Trilogy: The Nihilesthete, Penthouse F, Charlie P

Kalich, Richard

Literary

Paris, 1924: a city teeming with would-be poets, writers, painters and publishers... the Lost Generation. 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, the literati form their own improbable vigilante band: Gertrude Stein gathers the most prominent crime and mystery writers in the city, including Hector and the dark, mysterious mystery 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. "An amazing (and very smart) montage of mystery, murder, meta-fiction, and literary-history, quite unlike anything I've read before." --Craig Holden, "Four Corners of Night" "Vivid, remarkable characters--the historical people as well-drawn as the fictional ones!--in a rich, evocative setting, and a gruesome serial killer with one of the most unusual motives ever. Absolutely gripping!" --Diana Gabaldon "Craig McDonald proves he is a master of literary suspense in this riveting historical thriller set in the 1920s Paris of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Complex protagonists, shocking murders, and a gripping tale will leave you wanting more." --Stefanie Pintoff

One True Sentence: A Hector Lassiter novel

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

McDonald, Craig

Mystery

Key West, 1925: the USA's southernmost point and the most un-American of American locales; a rowdy border town surrounded by water and populated by sports fishermen, naval veterans and Cuban revolutionists -- misfits and mavericks, all. After several years abroad, crime writer Hector Lassiter arrives on "Bone Key" to reunite with his lost love Brinke Devlin, a fellow author and the woman destined to become the first Mrs. Lassiter. Hector finds an island in turmoil -- beset by fatal fires and savage attacks against women that the local press attributes to a baseball bat-wielding fiend dubbed "The Key West Clubber." When one of the Clubber's murders hits too close to home, the newlyweds begin to poke around the crimes. What they find casts doubt on the possibility of a single culprit. By turns sexy, sly and sinister, "Forever's Just Pretend" barrels along at a page-turning pace to a shattering conclusion that casts new light on Hector Lassiter and his legend."I loved Brinke Devlin the first time she came on the page and I loved her at the end, too. She's a fascinating character." --James Sallis, author of "Drive""The competition for the future of crime fiction is fierce, as it should be, but don't take your eyes off Craig McDonald. He's wily, talented and--rarest of the rare--a true original. I am always eager to see what he's going to do next." --Laura Lippman "James Ellroy + Kerouac + Coen brothers + Tarantino = Craig McDonald" --Amazon.fr

Forever's Just Pretend: A Hector Lassiter novel

Hector Lassiter is a crime novelist who writes what he lives and lives what he writes, frequently drawing those around him into the tawdry and turbulent territory of his novels. In "Toros & Torsos," Hector meets his match in the person of a mysterious killer committed to the craft of murder: an audacious provocateur who leaves a string of increasingly macabre, homicidal tableaus modeled after seminal works of surrealist art. This wildly original noir saga pits Lassiter against the ultimate performance artist in a duel to the death extending across three decades and three continents and ends in a wicked and unexpected climax that shakes the art world to its foundations. Life imitating art... art imitating death, and for some, it isn't truly art until somebody dies."Nothing short of a surrealistic masterwork." --Chicago Tribune"A bold, ambitious, genre-bending novel from the talented Craig McDonald." --George Pelecanos "Crime writer and ladies' man Hector Lassiter (Head Games) makes a return appearance in McDonald's outstanding second series effort. McDonald wows with his writing, which seems effortless despite using many voices, and his book will keep readers rapt." --Library Journal "In TOROS & TORSOS Craig McDonald takes pop culture, real people and invented action to create a powerful novel of suspense. It gives one the slippery sensation of time-travelling with characters you'd always wished you could meet and suddenly you can. McDonald is knowing and artful, and the suspense pushes at a lovely pace until it starts to stomp like Hemingway on an empty bota." --Daniel Woodrell

Toros & Torsos: A Hector Lassiter novel

World War II: the last good fight. In his own words, novelist Hector Lassiter confides the secret history of his clandestine campaigns in the European theatre and beyond, and his long, bloody battle of wits against a Nazi filmmaker. Aided by a beautiful OSS operative and a two-fisted Irish cop-turned-Army intelligence officer, Hector takes on the impossible mission of smuggling a hard-hunted Jewish orphan from France while pursued by the might of Germany's occupying army. The high-stakes chase extends from decadent Berlin to occupied France, from post-war Hollywood to the steaming jungles of Brazil. A dazzling fusion of crime fiction and espionage thriller, "Roll the Credits" is also a haunting study of the birth of film noir and the bloody underbelly of cinematic history, with a supporting cast including icons of the Lost Generation and heroes of the French resistance."A writer of truly unique voice, approach, and ambition, Craig McDonald delivers again with "Roll the Credits." Hector Lassiter is a compelling character but also a fascinating forum for McDonald's historical, social, and artistic observations. For all the wonderful action, slick dialogue, and plot twists McDonald throws at the reader, he's equally interested in saying something substantial about time and place. Not to be missed." --Michael Koryta

Roll the Credits: A Hector Lassiter novel

Nazis, black magic and secret history collide in Craig McDonald's "The Great Pretender." In 2007, McDonald launched the Hector Lassiter series with the Edgar Award-nominated debut, "Head Games," pairing the globetrotting, larger-than-life crime novelist with equally legendary filmmaker and amateur magician Orson Welles. "The Great Pretender" fits the capstone on the Lassiter/Welles legend, spanning their decades-long, uneasy association from the run-up to Welles' infamous "War of the Worlds Panic Broadcast of 1938" to the set of the noir classic "The Third Man" and the ruins of post-war Vienna. The novel finds the actor and author in a race for a lost holy relic promising its possessor infinite power but a ghastly death if lost. Hector and Orson's competitors in their quest for the 'Spear of Destiny' or 'Holy Lance' include German occultists, members of the Third Reich, a sensuous Creole Voodoo priestess and a strangely obsessed J. Edgar Hoover.PRAISE FOR THE HECTOR LASSITER NOVELS: "With each of his Hector Lassiter novels, Craig McDonald has stretched his canvas wider and unfurled tales of increasingly greater resonance." --Megan Abbott "Reading a Hector Lassiter novel is like having a great uncle pull you aside, pour you a tumbler of rye, and tell you a story about how the 20th century 'really' went down." --Duane Swierczynski "James Ellroy + Kerouac + Coen brothers + Tarantino = Craig McDonald." --Amazon.fr

The Great Pretender: A Hector Lassiter novel

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