You may have
noticed things are different here at OBAAT. With Down & Out Books
announcing the October 26th re-launch of both Worst Enemies and Grind Joint,
it’s time for the Relentless Self-Promotion Machine™ to get cranked up for
another assault on your sensitivities and good taste.
Never heard of
either of them? You must be new to the blog. Not wishing to be remiss, this
should catch you up.
Penns River is an
amalgam of three small towns in Western Pennsylvania where I grew up and still
have close family ties. (My parents live in the same house I grew up in, bought
in 1960, a couple of weeks before Bill Mazeroski’s home run won the World
Series.) My memory of the local economy is a constant stream of mills closing
and jobs lost. A lot of people my age—me, for example—left for brighter
economic futures.
Pittsburgh
recovered to become a hub of medicine, education, and finance. The North Hills
and South Hills came back with it. Not so much farther up the Allegheny, where
population fell along with the economy. Land that used to be a diary farm, with
the easiest access to the expressway that runs into Pittsburgh, is now a
relatively affluent bedroom community with homes on two-acre lots. The people
who live there neither earn nor spend their money locally.
Worst Enemies spends a lot of time around those houses.
Tom Widmer makes good money in Pittsburgh’s financial industry. He and his wife
Marian spend it just as fast, if not faster. Neither really wants the other
around anymore. This is a murder story. You can see where this leads.
Not two miles away
as the crow flies sits what used to be a busy shopping center. Montgomery Ward
on one end, J.C. Penny on the other, with a connecting waist of small local
businesses. Wards closed in 2003; Penney’s two years later. Nothing replaced
them. The city is in constant dispute with the owner and has declared the
remaining hulk to be unsafe. The owner refuses to do anything with it,
including sell it. The city can’t afford to seize it under eminent domain. It
decays a little each year, a monument to failure.
Grind Joint’s focus is here. A real estate developer
who missed out on the big money when
You wouldn’t think organized
crime would be an issue in such a town. Ordinarily it isn’t. The towns that
inspired Penns River were once hotspots of mob activity, with afterhours clubs
and pretty much any action anyone could want. The underboss of the Pittsburgh
crime family—a national figure in his day—lived there along with his brother
and his crew. The leader of what’s left of the Pittsburgh mob still lives in
the fictional Penns River and has declared it a crime-free zone as a way to
build goodwill in a town where everybody knows who—and what—he is, but the
old-timers still remember the good old days when the Mob had an even bigger
presence and life was good.
Tasked with
maintaining order among these disparate forces are fewer than 40 cops, hindered
by a city government in thrall to whatever might bring some money back to town.
There aren’t enough of them, most of those who are there didn’t sign on for
this kind of duty, and no help is on the horizon.
Those are the
stories I hope to tell in Penns River.
The books are
available for pre-order now; the formal release date is October 26. Full
information on ordering is on each book’s page at the Down & Out web site:
I’ll have more on
both books as the date approaches.
(Editor's Note: Thanks are owed to everyone connected with Down & Out Books; they're day is coming. I do want to point out the brilliant cover art provided by the indefatigable and seemingly ubiquitous Eric Beetner. Well done, sir, and thank you.)
1 comment:
I seemed to hear Down and Out's name everywhere at Bouchercon, so perhaps their day has already come. For that matter, the same could be said for Mr. Beetner.
Although I already have both these books, I will look forward to future publications. And as I actually haven't read Worst Enemies yet, your description here makes me want to bump it up the list.
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