Showing results by narrator "Keith Szarabajka" in All Categories

In the wake of San Francisco Noir, Los Angeles Noir, and Orange County Noir - all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series - comes the latest California installment, Oakland Noir. Masterfully curated by Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller, the "Czar of Noir", this volume will shock, titillate, provoke, and entertain. The diverse cast of talented contributors will not disappoint.

Small-town boys Caleb and Jake Boyd spend their days splitting logs and barely scraping by in the badlands of New Mexico. Caleb, a decorated war hero, wants to put his fighting days behind him, find a decent job, and start a quiet life with his new fiancée. But Jake is always dreaming bigger than he should, and when he stumbles across a large crop of marijuana hidden in the wilderness, he thinks he has finally hit the jackpot.

This is Your Brain on Sports is the book for sports fans searching for a deeper understanding of the games they watch and the people who play them. Sports Illustrated executive editor and bestselling author L. Jon Wertheim teams up with Tufts psychologist Sam Sommers to take readers on a wild...

Harrison has tremendous fun with his own reputation in the title novella about an aging writer in Montana who spars with his estranged wife, with whom he still shares a home; weathers the slings and arrows of literary success; and tries to cope with the sow he buys on a whim and the unplanned litter of piglets that follow soon after. In "Eggs", a Montana woman reminisces about staying in London with her grandparents and collecting eggs at their country house. Years later, having never had a child, she attempts to do so.

Edgar and Macavity Award nominee Timothy Hallinan's Simeon Grist private-eye novels have become cult favorites. This sixth series installment takes place in the West Hollywood of 1995, where the community is shaken by the brutal killing of an older man who was widely loved for his generosity and kindness. In a time when the police were largely indifferent to crimes against gay people, Simeon is hired to catch the murderer - and finds himself up against the most dangerous adversary of his career.

Edgar and Macavity Award-nominated author Timothy Hallinan throws his erudite Los Angeles private eye into the middle of a global human-trafficking operation in this fifth book in the series. Simeon Grist does a favor for the family of his sometimes-girlfriend, Eleanor Chan, and goes looking for two children who vanished in Chinatown. He quickly learns that he's gone straight through the looking glass and into a world where grieving parents are afraid to contact the police, where fear is the teacher and power is the law.

Simeon Grist is about to face off against his most terrifying adversary - a madman who's setting fire to the homeless. As Simeon is drawn into the case, very much against his will, he realizes that the "Incinerator" has a huge advantage. Somewhere, years ago, the two of them met, and the Incinerator has been nursing hatred and resentment for years. Now, as helpless people burst into flame on Skid Row, Simeon has to scour the wastelands of Los Angeles, and his own past, looking for the face of a killer.

Before his stroke and the onset of old age, Frank Lazorg was the king of the fantasy illustrators - with an ego to match. But he can paint no more. That is, until he starts taking a bizarre new drug that promises to restore his creative powers. Unfortunately, artistic reinvigoration comes with a steep price tag: addiction and madness. With his rage and jealousy unleashed and his grasp of reality severely compromised, Lazorg is led to commit an unspeakable act, and, in turn, is led... somewhere else.

After decades apart, the five siblings find themselves together again at their ailing mother’s bedside, caught in a deadlocked feud over her hospice care. Into the morass steps Murron Teinetoa, one of their bastard children, who carries an idealistic hope of finally fitting in among her estranged relatives.In an interweaving narrative, Malae portrays the Felices in their formative years of the fifties; he excavates the personal lives of the siblings in the eighties and nineties; and he follows Murron in the present as she raises her son as a single mother.

The acclaimed and endlessly entertaining novel about a Navy pilot, based on real events from the author’s life. Vinny Vesta, the hero of Mafia Summer, returns as a dashing Navy pilot in Fighter Squadron 176 in the late 1950s, living a glorious bachelor’s life. But a torrid affair with his copilot’s widow, Kat Pennington, pulls him away from his beloved all-night revels - and back into the family business. As Kat’s mafioso father tries to poison her new relationship, Vinny finds himself at the heart of a major Mafia feud.

Jay is a burly insurance company apparatchik whose job is to prevent losses for the company. George Trowbridge is an insured Hollywood actor who faces prison time. Jay decides George needs a jail coach: Katrina Thompson.

It all started with some businessmen bankrolling Richard Nixon to become a "salesman against socialization". But in this precursor to current campaign finance scandals, Nixon had some explaining to do to keep his place on Eisenhower’s Republican ticket, so he took to the airwaves. In making his speech, Nixon left behind lines about a "Republican cloth coat" and a black-and-white cocker spaniel named Checkers. The speech saved and bolstered Nixon’s political career and set the tone for the 1952 campaign. Just Plain Dick is political history and more.

Russell Mullins has left intelligence work. When his wife died of cancer, Rusty quit the Secret Service to repurpose his life. He joins a private protection company in Washington, DC, and is assigned to guard Paul Luguire, a Federal Reserve executive and chief liaison with the US Treasury. Mullins and Luguire form a strong friendship. So when a police detective calls in the middle of the night with word of Luguire’s suicide, Mullins doesn’t buy it.

His doubts are reinforced by Amanda Church, a former Secret Service colleague now in the Federal Reserve’s cybersecurity unit. She uncovered a suspicious financial transaction initiated by Luguire only days before his death.

Welterweight boxer Eddie Cero is out of the ring with an injury, but he still can’t bear to see an unfair fight. In a Philadelphia alley, he steps in on two punks beating up an older man—and the victim, a private detective, buys Eddie a round and offers him a parttime gig. After a few days on the job, Eddie stumbles on a cold case involving the frontman for the Excels, one of Philadelphia’s best soul acts.

Generoso Pope, Sr., an Italian immigrant, arrived in New York in 1906 with only pennies in his pocket. He got a job shoveling sand, but through his intelligence, he worked his way up to become the biggest provider of cement, just as it was becoming the key material for building. Gene Pope, Jr., was his father’s choice to inherit and run the business, but Gene’s mother and two brothers forced him out, and he found himself penniless and on his own. With a loan from his godfather, mobster Frank Costello, Gene bought the New York Enquirer. He renamed it the National Enquirer.

Midnight Rider Productions is a dark-web nightmare machine, headed by the one man who years ago drove Darby to hide in the seamy environs of Old Town and make his life there. But Darby left his own mark back in the day, and the shadowy head of production has a grudge to settle. Rider has found him at long last and plans to make an example of him.

Time is up in Old Town. As the pace of gentrification reaches frenzy in Portland, Oregon, Darby Holland’s beloved tattoo parlor, Lucky Supreme, is destroyed by a bomb that ripped through an entire city block. Only a warning call from his favorite prostitute saved his life. Developers have been like wolves at the door of Dmitri (the drunken landlord) for the past few years, but this is different.

When newly divorced Sage arrives in Bali, his only plan is to drink on the beach until his money runs out and then return home to start over. So he's caught by surprise when he falls in love with the country and its people, particularly the attractive and considerate Ratri. Soon Sage can no longer see himself living anywhere else, even as his funds dwindle and his visa's expiration date nears. Increasingly desperate to stay with Ratri, Sage finds himself being recruited by a drug-smuggling ring - in a country where drug trafficking is punishable by death.

Zack is unemployed, overweight, recently divorced, and lives with his mother. Whilst a lesser man would wither away in emo-laden angst, Zack has found inspiration during this difficult stretch of life. A renaissance man, Zack conjures up brilliant ideas (soap on a rope, a Sammy Davis, Jr. biopic starring Tom Cruise, vases of flowers in Port-a-Potties nationwide), offers services (babysitter for Sophia Coppola, compiler and burner for a Beatles Best-of), and attempts to woo unsuspecting ladies with his lifelike sketches of firearms.

As part of their trafficking in counterfeit merch, they are looking to turn a few pallets of grade Z computer chips into some military hardware sure to interest dictators and despots and drug lords around the globe. Bankrolled by a greedy local crime boss, they hope to promote a half-genius, half-addlepated invention from a naive and principled inventor into a bonanza. But no one ever counts on complications arising.