Books published by Down & Out Books

THE DAMP FEDORA introduces 1940's detective Nelle Callahan, gal gumshoe with gumption, with a case that struts its stuff like the breeze off a good Narragansett sail. Brisk. Brash. Knowing where the wind's coming from, and yet...wondering. Nelle's job? Cut through some slick con's shadow, lift a corner of chintz off the mist, let some truth shine in for the chippies and the chopper squad-you know-menfolk who measure themselves by how big their tommy guns really are. In this outing, Nelle finds herself helping a damp fedora wearing Harry-who's not a Harry- Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus, MLB pitcher Paul Katcher and her OSS handler-agent, none other than former White Sox catcher Moe Berg.

After being beaten and left for dead, Steven finds himself stranded alongside the 101 in a small Northern California town. When a mysterious stranger named Quinn offers a hand in exchange for help reuniting with his daughter in San Francisco, Steven gets in the car and begins a journey from which there is no return. Quinn has an agenda all his own and he#&146;s unleashing vengeance at each stop along his path. With a coked-up sadist ex-cop chasing Quinn, and two mismatched small town cops chasing the ex-cop, Steven is unaware of the violent tempest brewing. Corrupt cops and death-dealing gangsters manipulate the maze each of them must navigate to get to the one thing they#&146;re all after: Teresa, the girl holding the secret that will rip open a decades-old scandal and scorch San Francisco#&146;s City Hall. Steven finds Teresa homeless and strung out as their pursuers close in and bodies begin to pile high on the Bay Area#&146;s back streets. Hand in hand Steven and Teresa lead the mad parade of desperate men to the edge of the void. American Static is a fast paced crime thriller with a mystery woven in. It#&146;s played out against the backdrop of Northern California#&146;s wine country, Oakland#&146;s mean streets, and San Francisco#&146;s peaks and alleys, written by one of its favorite sons, a man who knows the underbelly of the city like no one else. American Static#&146;s prose has been compared to Elmore Leonard, Richard Price, and Don Winslow.

Cincinnati, just before rock changed from spandex to flannel... Kenny Rockford has the best gig in town, drumming for local heroes The Selekt. The pay's OK, but the benefits are amazing. One benefit is Jean Cassidy, the girl at the club with a taste for the loud and fast. And they're making beautiful music together-until Kenny learns about Jean's husband. From there on, it's lust, murder and madness, at a tempo even Kenny may not be able to match. Praise for BROKEN GLASS WALTZES: "I tried to read this slowly to prolong the pleasure, but found it impossible. The blend of obsession, darkness, and intriguing character and plot, as well as seamless literary style, wouldn't let me go." -Edgar Award-nominated crime novelist Vicki Hendricks "Broken Glass Waltzes is as relentless as Tony Iommi's guitar and pounds at the reader's brain like Dave Lombardo's machine gun drums. A heavy metal noir ride replete with sex, drugs, rock n' roll-and a murder conceived in insanity-this wicked gem moves at a breakneck pace from the moment Cincinnati's number one metal drummer meets the girl of his nightmares to the shocking climax. Two sets of devil horns, high up." -Ed Kurtz, author of Bleed, Control, and A Wind of Knives

Jake and his pal Bud's journey begins six months after he is released on parole and is occasioned when his girlfriend Donna dumps him and aborts their child. After a suicide attempt where the Norelco shaver cord he used to hang himself breaks, on an impulse-everything in Jake's life happens "just like that"-he calls up Bud, who lives by the same credo, and the two take off with no particular destination in mind. They're just going "south"-somewhere where it's warm. An hour before they leave, Jake on another impulse, holds up a convenience store to get some traveling money. Ultimately, they end up in New Orleans and then Lake Charles, Louisiana and from there, back to Indiana. Along the way are many "watercooler" moments and near the end Jake takes a fall when he is caught burglarizing a bar back in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, gets shot in the leg and is returned to Pendleton where he kills the inmate he had a nasty encounter with during his first stay in prison. Just Like That is based on an actual trip the author took with an ex-prison cellmate under similar circumstances as protagonist Jake Mayes does in the narrative. The scenes in Pendleton are also based on true experiences he had while incarcerated. Approximately 85% of the novel is taken from real life. Portions of the book have previously appeared as short stories in the literary magazines Murdaland, Flatmancrooked, and High Plains Literary Review, the latter of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was selected for inclusion in Houghton Mifflin's Best American Mystery Stories, 2001. Praise for JUST LIKE THAT: "Edgerton's got a story to tell you so get ready; it's coming at you fast. Get ready..." -Linwood Barclay, international bestseller "Edgerton draws memorable portraits of these dangerous and unpredictable characters." -Library Journal "Just Like That is yet another Les Edgerton winner. In his prison memoir, Edgerton conjures up in honest, Bukowski-esque prose a mad dog life lived behind and beyond the bars of institutional correctional facilities. Literature's version of Johnny Cash, America has yet another gifted bard to sing the blues of time served. I have long believed Edgerton to be an American original, who has for too long remained one of our best kept literary secrets." -Cortright McMeel, author of Short "Just Like That has it all. Great dialogue, whipcrack scenes and meaty characters haul you along on a hardboiled crime road-trip worthy of the Elmore Leonard and Joe R Lansdale. A shot to the heart as well as the head, Just Like That is highly recommended." -Paul D. Brazill, author of A Case of Noir "Edgerton establishes the kind convincing, and wrenching, interiority with his characters achieved by only the most adept fiction writers." -Peter Donahue, Sam Houston State University "Edgerton's best stories are uncompromising in their casual amorality. They stare you down over the barrel of a gun, rip you up whether or not the trigger gets squeezed." -Diane Lefer, UCLA and Vermont College, author of The Circles I Move In "Les Edgerton creates a vivid and compelling world. We feel the rhythm of his language and live in the skins of his characters. Altogether, a memorable experience." -Gladys Swan, Missouri University and Vermont College, author of A Visit to Stranger "Les Edgerton writes like a poet with a mean streak, and his prose goes down easy and smooth like good liquor as it carves up your insides." -Henry Perez, bestselling author of Mourn the Living "The characters in Edgerton's world bite down hard and grind up one another with their back teeth. Their authenticity is palpable as soft-shelled clams; these are sad, mean, fully human characters who long for connection almost as fiercely as they fear it." -Melody Henion Stevenson, author of The Life Stone of Singing Bird

Matt Chance is on the run. Murder, sexual exploitation, designer drugs, international terrorism and an off the rails CIA station chief. When Matt Chance is asked to look into what first appears to be a simple but brutal crime, he has no idea of the combination of forces which will send him on the run and threaten his life as well as the lives of those closest to him. A teenaged street boy is found viciously murdered in the most unlikely of places, his nude body laid out on the bare concrete floor of the slaughterhouse where they kill the pigs. The boy was a student at the muay thai school run by Coach Somchai, who is also Matt's mentor. Afraid the cops may find the killing easy to dismiss as just another meth crazed killing, Coach Somchai calls on Matt to look into the boy's death. Matt finds the boy was drawn into a sex service ring whose clients include international terrorists and those who control them. Most troubling of all, the trail leads Matt to a covert CIA operation and one of the most notorious of CIA operatives, a man Matt has clashed with before in Iraq. The operative's power in Thailand means Matt's safety is in question. He must run for his life searching outside of Thailand for allies to help counterbalance the threat and solve the murder.

Winnie doesn't remember the last time she felt anything below her neck. Her spine is severed at the seventh vertebrae, but thanks to implants from a sabotaged biomedical start-up, she has regained mobility. She is a prototype: a living, breathing-walking-demonstration of revolutionary technology that never made it to market. Her disability has become her armor. Because she doesn't register fatigue, she has trained relentlessly. Her hand, arm, and leg strength are off the scales for a woman, and she has honed self-defense techniques to channel that strength. She's a modern-day Amazon who feels no pain. When the sociopath who torpedoed the start-up sends killers to harvest the implants from her body, Winnie must team up with broken-down private investigator August Riordan to save both their lives-and derail sinister plans for perverse military applications of the technology. Praise for books by Mark Coggins "A bang-bang thrill ride. Winnie is a female Jack Reacher." -Seth Harwood, author In Broad Daylight "Smart, stylish, sexy and amusingly insouciant...a panoramic tour de fource." -San Francisco Chronicle "Gritty...seamy...very, very funny. [Coggins] has given the form fresh life." -National Public Radio "Dry ice sarcasm...and plenty of nasty chuckles in route." -Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Coggins hauls on a dark, hip journey." -Detroit Free Press "Coggins writes tight prose with a clean, unadorned style; he is a Hammett for the turn of the 21st century." -Loren D. Estleman "Utterly entertaining" -Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

Nominated for the 2017 Anthony Award for Best Anthology/Collection For the first time, more than two dozen crime and mystery authors have joined together to use the strongest weapon at their disposal - words - in a call for reasonable gun control in the U.S.A. In this collection you get all the thrills and excitement you come to expect from a great crime story, but without any guns. From best sellers and writing legends to the brightest stars of the next generation of crime writers, the twenty-five authors here have taken pen in hand to say enough is enough. Gun violence has got to stop and this is our way of speaking out - by showing that gun violence can be removed from the narrative, and maybe from our lives. It's not anti-gun, it's pro-sanity. And above anything else, these are thrilling crime stories that will surprise and shock, thrill and chill - all without a gun in sight. The writers are from both sides of the political aisle and many of the authors are gun owners themselves. But everyone felt it was time to speak out. Featuring the talents of J.L. Abramo , Patricia Abbott, Trey R. Barker, Eric Beetner, Alec Cizak, Joe Clifford, Reed Farrel Coleman, Angel Luis Colón, Hilary Davidson, Paul J. Garth, Alison Gaylin, Kent Gowran, Rob Hart, Jeffery Hess, Grant Jerkins, Joe R. Lansdale, S.W. Lauden, Tim O'Mara, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Pitts, Thomas Pluck, Keith Rawson, Kelli Stanley, Ryan Sayles, and Holly West. Proceeds from the sales of Unloaded will benefit the nonprofit States United To Prevent Gun Violence (ceasefireusa.org).