An Interview With Joe Ricker, New Owner and Publisher of Down and Out Books

 Joe Ricker has appeared three times on the blog; until today, all have been as an author. (In case you’re interested, Joe’s prior appearances were in 2015, 2020, and 2021.) Today he takes his first questions since he resurrected the ashes of Down and Out Books and became its owner and publisher.

I got out before Down and Out became Way Down and All-the-way Out, but I had many friends with contracts there and am delighted to see they may be finding homes; Joe’s history as an author gave me hope for a more generous atmosphere. With that in mind, I wanted to give Joe a platform, as well as give authors some much needed information about what’s going on at the new Down and Out. So, without further ado, here’s Joe Ricker.

OBAAT: Welcome back to the blog, Joe. It’s always good to have you here. No book to promo this time. Today we’re getting together to talk about your new role as owner/operator of the resurrected Down & Out Books, so these questions may be a little more pointed than usual. With that in mind, tell us a little about your writing journey. Not the writing resume — that’s in the intro — but what inspired you to write in the first place, how you came to be published, and how smooth or bumpy the road was up to the time you signed with Down & Out.

JR: My father is a poet, so writing was in the house before I had any say about it. I grew up emulating him, and for most of my adolescence I wrote almost nothing but poetry. What prose I did write was fan fiction before I knew there was a word for it — Westerns, mostly. I once wrote a story that put Josey Wales and Billy the Kid in the same world. I’d hand those pages to my dad, looking for some kind of bonding, or validation, or both.

After military school I hit a bleak stretch. It got bad enough that I needed help finding my way out of a lifestyle that didn’t have any brakes on it. Reading fiction again was part of how I climbed out of that. So was journaling, and then poetry again. That poetry did more to shape my style than anything I was taught later.

In undergrad I drifted from poetry into fiction without knowing what kind of fiction I wanted to write, and I tried a lot of things that didn’t fit. I didn’t land on crime until graduate school. My thesis wasn’t considered crime fiction, but somewhere in there I wrote a story called “Ice Shack,” the first thing I’d ever written that I was genuinely happy with, and it lit the way toward the genre I’ve stayed in since. It came out of a hard-scrabble upbringing and the kind of details you don’t get from research. “Ice Shack” also became my first published story, in a Level Best Books anthology, and after that I mostly wrote crime short stories. I’d written a crime novel during undergrad, too, but I couldn’t figure out how to clean it up. That book took me years. It eventually became All the Good in Evil.

The road was bumpy. Short story publications kept me moving — there’s a charge that comes with placing something when you’re young and trying to emerge, and it makes you want to write the next one. I had my first novel under contract at one point and watched that deal dissolve. It wasn’t hostile. The editor was taking the book somewhere that wasn’t wrong, exactly; it just wasn’t mine, and too much of what I wanted on the page was disappearing. So, I walked and went back to submitting. Dozens and dozens of agents and publishers, back when the rejections still came on paper. I wish I’d kept them.

Then, after grad school, when I was living in New York, I submitted a novel that got rejected — but the publisher had read some of my short stories and asked if I had anything else. I asked if they’d take a collection. They said yes. I did not have a collection. I was teaching, I wasn’t making any money, and there wasn’t much to do besides hike with Kamani and sit in front of a blank screen, so that’s what I did until I had enough stories. That became Walkin’ After Midnight. The title was the publisher’s idea, off the Patsy Cline song. I’d recently been divorced and it had been my ex-wife’s favorite song. It seemed fitting, and a little ironic, which is usually how these things go.

OBAAT: How did you first connect with Down & Out?

JR: By way of another publisher going under. Walkin’ After Midnight came out from 280 Steps, and for a while that looked like a promising, long-term home. I took a semester off from teaching, spent my savings, and put together a tour with some help from the publisher and from people I knew — Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, A Capella Books in Atlanta, Dan’s Silver Leaf in Denton, Texas, and a few others. The turnouts in the places where I’d lived and tended bar were the good part. Then I went back to New York and things went to hell: disagreements about royalties, no paperwork to support what the sales supposedly were, and no way for me out of the contract. The publisher folded within about a year. The rights came back to me and I was at square one, disillusioned enough that I didn’t make much effort to place the book anywhere else.

What changed it was Jonathan Ashley, another 280 Steps author, who had moved his books to a publisher I’d never heard of. He told me I needed to submit Walkin’ After Midnight to Down & Out. I sent it in, Eric [Campbell] and I talked, and the book was accepted — though the plan was to let some time pass, since 280 had just closed and there was bad blood in the water.

Then it went quiet. In that stretch I quit teaching, worked remotely doing freelance writing and voiceover, and lived out of my SUV, driving around the country trying to figure out where home was going to be. I worked on a goat ranch in New Mexico, kept working on Some Awful Cunning, and kept striking out with agents. It had been a year or so when I finally followed up with Down & Out while I was in the Michigan U.P., and the conversation picked back up where it left off. I asked about some other books, and those were taken on as well. By the time Walkin’ After Midnight was re-released, I’d settled in Reno, where I was bartending and teaching at the University of Nevada. Down & Out went on to publish four of my books, two of them during COVID, which made getting any traction that much harder.

OBAAT: How did you learn of Down & Out’s demise? What was its effect on you personally and professionally?

JR: I was back in Maine visiting family. I hadn’t been home in seven years, not since I’d moved to Reno, and I went because my father was sick and I needed to make up some lost time. I was staying at my brother’s — he’d just bought a house — and one day I checked my email and there it was. The notice Down & Out had closed their doors out about a week earlier.

Professionally it meant four books in limbo and no publisher, which is a daunting place to be at any age. Personally, it was 280 Steps all over again, except this time there was more of my work and a longer relationship tied up in it. What it really took out of me was motivation. I knew exactly what the road back looked like — the submissions, the waiting, the starting over — and I didn’t have much appetite for walking it a third time.

OBAAT: What made you decide to bring Down & Out back to life?

JR: Partly it was that I was already thinking hard about what kind of life I wanted, apart from the work I was doing at the time. The idea started as a maybe. I tossed it around for a while and talked it over with my wife.

My first email wasn’t about buying anything. I asked if there was any way I could help — managing it, running some part of it, whatever would keep the doors open. From there the conversation turned into buying the brand outright. A few conversations later the transfer was agreed to, and here I am.

The reasoning was simple enough. I didn’t think I had the platform to build a press from scratch and make it work, by whatever measure you want to use for that. Taking over a name with a real history in crime fiction gave me better odds. And it wasn’t only about my four books. There were a lot of other authors in exactly the position I’d been in twice already. I could see online how much frustration was out there, and I knew it was going to be a very difficult challenge — that created plenty of doubt — but the alternative was watching a good house and a strong list disappear. I decided it wasn’t going to.

OBAAT: No offense intended, but what qualifies you to run a publishing company?

JR: None taken. If you’re looking for a résumé of publishing-house management, I don’t have one, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. When I stepped into this, my knowledge of how a press actually runs was limited.

What I do have — and I’d argue it’s the most important qualification on the list — is the motivation to make it work and keep it going. Beyond that, years of freelance writing, the organizational demands of academia, and teaching at the college level taught me how to network, keep complicated projects moving, and get other people invested enough to contribute. Just as important for a genre house is that I know the material. I’ve lived in crime and noir a long time, as a reader and a writer, and I understand what these books are supposed to do.

The rest I’m learning as I go, and I’m doing most of it myself right now: marketing, interior layout, contracts, cover design — things I never expected to have to learn. It’s been an interesting education, and honestly an enjoyable one. Some of it has been harder than the paperwork. Taking over a company that closed and upset a lot of people meant taking some of the brunt of that, and figuring out how to talk to writers who are disappointed and have every right to be. I’ll develop the rest of these qualifications by running the company, and I expect a fair amount of that education to come through failure.

OBAAT: What changes do you intend to make to the business model?

JR: The biggest one is scale, and I’d rather talk about where we’re going than where anything has been. Our target right now is ten books a year. That number is deliberate. It’s a pace that lets us put real time, money, and attention into every single title instead of pushing books out the door and hoping they find readers on their own.

Keeping the list that size is what makes everything else possible. It means more time and money on marketing and promotion — I’m already talking with marketers and other firms about that, and looking at avenues we haven’t used before. It also means more development per book: audio editions, and where a project lends itself to it, screenplays and treatments, graphic adaptations, serialized versions. Those conversations are underway now.

The other priority is author exposure. We’re reaching out to magazines and podcasts to get our writers interviews and coverage, and pushing to get physical copies onto bookstore shelves rather than living entirely online. In the immediate term, the work is getting re-contracted authors’ books back up, restarting promotion on those titles, and rebuilding the website and the public face of the company.

Some of that is already in place. We’ve re-signed twelve former Down & Out authors and kept more than fifty books in print. We’ve signed four new authors with books coming out next year. Royalties have been paid to the authors who decided to take a chance on me as an inexperienced publisher with a press most of their peers have done nothing but cast shade toward. We’re rolling into a rhythm now, and I think that rhythm is what will carry Down & Out to the place I see for it.

In a nutshell: We won’t take on more than we can carry. I’d rather give a smaller list the attention it deserves and help those authors actually sell books than spread us thin across a catalog nobody has time to support.

OBAAT: A lot of newly-orphaned writers are looking hopefully in your direction. What can you tell them to set their minds at ease that things won’t turn out the same as they did under your predecessor?

JR: Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything I can say right now that will put anybody’s mind at ease, and I’m not going to insult anyone by trying. Writers who had a bad experience are upset and frustrated, and that’s earned. I’ve been orphaned by two publishers myself. I know what promises are worth at this stage.

What I can do is point at what’s already been done rather than at what I intend to do. Twelve former authors have re-signed. More than fifty books are still in print. Four new authors are signed with books coming out next year. Royalties have been paid. That’s the whole argument, and it will keep being the argument: sticking to the model, keeping the list small enough that we can actually support it, communicating clearly, and prioritizing each author’s success rather than just the company’s. Some writers are going to want a clean start somewhere else, and I understand that completely — a number already have. For the ones who stay, or who come aboard, the plan is to put our heads down, do the work, and get people talking about Down & Out in a positive way again. That’s not something I can say into place. It has to be shown, one book at a time.

Author's Note From Sideshow

 

The new Nick Forte novel, Sideshow, may be the most personally important book I’ve ever written. Enough so that I decided to include an author’s note, something I’ve never done before.

 

 Here it is:

 

No straight, cisgender person can fully understand what it’s like to be a member of the LGBTQIA+ community; the best we can do is empathize and treat them with the same respect and courtesy as we do everyone else.

The years have brought me closer to this too-often marginalized community. Among the handful of best friends I’ve ever had is a gay man. My only child’s godmother is a lesbian. I have a transgender step-daughter; my brother has a transgender sister-in-law. I once dated an intersex woman. If I can safely say one thing that encompasses them, it is that they all want the same things everyone else wants: to be left alone to lead the happiest lives they can find for themselves.

I’ve rewritten this author’s note several times, trying to describe exactly how I feel. I finally found a couple of quotes from people far more qualified to express them.

The actress Jodie Foster said: “Being gay is like being left-handed—some people are, most people aren’t, and nobody really knows exactly why. It’s not right or wrong; it’s just one of the many natural ways to be. The world works best when everyone gets to live as they truly are. So if you ever feel out of place, remember: you're not broken, you're just beautifully different—and that’s something the world needs."

That’s how I see it. I am six feet, one inch tall and a little overweight. My hair is gray and my eyes are brown. Jodie’s quote applies to me as well: It’s not right or wrong; it’s just one of the many natural ways to be.

Transgender care therapist Dr. Collette Lord is credited with the phrase, “The existence of intersex people is proof that nature doesn’t see gender as a binary.” As Hamlet said, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Indigenous Americans have long understood gender is not binary. The idea has arisen from Christianity’s efforts to make the world a neater, safer, and more understandable place than it has ever been, or can me.

This book is as important to me as anything I’ve ever written, and it vexes me to know I didn’t get it as right as I wanted. I hope I got it as close as a straight cisgender man can and that readers will understand anything I got wrong was not done out of malice.

I’ll close with a quote often incorrectly attributed to Morgan Freeman: “I hate the word homophobia. It’s not a phobia. You’re not scared. You’re an asshole.”

If you take issue with anything in this book, please feel free to contact me through my web site, danakingauthor.com. I learned a lot writing this book. Most of what I learned is how much I still don’t know.

My eternal thanks to Christa Faust for pointing out a flaw in how I approached gay characters, John Copenhaver for encouraging me to take this step forward, and especially to Robyn Gigl for taking the time to read critical sections and provide invaluable feedback even though she knew me for all of five minutes before agreeing. To all of you, I did the best I could. I hope it was close to enough.

 

Sideshow is available through Amazon in both print ($9.99) and e-book ($2.99) versions.

An Excerpt From the New Nick Forte Novel, Sideshow

Here’s an excerpt from the new Nick Forte novel, Sideshow, available on Amazon in print for $9.99 and as an e-book for $2.99.

 

Beth Bryant got right to business. “How many men have you killed?”

I saw no reason to sugar coat it. I was the guy paying for the hour. “Seven. That I know of.”

She paused her pen above the notebook. Added what I could tell from the motion of her hand was a question mark. “You’re not sure?”

“A year or so back I was trapped into a situation where I had to shoot at cars. It’s possible I hit a person. I know at least one man got hurt when I blew up a propane tank. Nothing in the papers about anyone dying and the cops never bothered me about it, but I suppose it’s possible someone could’ve been mortally wounded. It’s not like I visited people in the hospital or kept in touch with their families.”

“You think this is funny?”

I took a deep breath. “No, and I don’t mean to give that impression. You work with many cops?”

“Mostly retired. Those on duty tend to stay with in-house shrinks for their counseling.”

I liked her saying shrink. Last thing I needed was one with a stick up her ass. “Then I’m sure I’m not the first one to say something inappropriate. Cops see so much they’ll never unsee they have to make fun of it or go crazy. I wouldn’t be here if I thought killing all those men was funny. Come to think about it, that would’ve been an even better reason to come.”

“How do you feel about it?”

Someone once told me the difference between a good question and a great question was he knew the answer to a great question. This was a damn good question. I’d been thinking about it for years and the best I had for her was, “I honest to God don’t know.”

One of Beth’s eyebrows called bullshit.

“Honest to God. They’re all different. It’s safe to say the world’s a better place without them. Except maybe one, and he was an accident. The rest, they had to go. It was them or me.” Pretty much.

“Heat of the moment kinds of things?”

Deep breath. “Confidentially, right?”

“Unless you’re about to tell me you’re going to kill someone. Your past is safe with me.”

I took time to settle myself. Beth gave me all I wanted. “One guy. Russian gangster. His was a case of what I call prophylactic self-defense.”

“You killed him to remove a future threat?”

“You’ve heard it before?”

“The legal term is ‘preventive self-defense.’ It describes the use of force against a non-imminent threat.”

“This guy brought a whole crew to my uncle’s house to kill me, my cousin, and my uncle. Probably my aunt if he had the chance. I get the drop on him and he gives himself up. ‘Go ahead. Arrest me,’ he says because he knows he’ll be out the next morning. A week or a month or a year later he, or one of his buddies, would come up behind me and put two behind my ear. He had to go as sure as the ones who were actively shooting at me.”

“You said they’re all different. How does he compare to the others?”

I generally avoided thinking about ranking my kills as if they were college football teams. It wouldn’t be fair to Caroline for me to dance around it. I needed to either answer this question honestly or go home and face her.

I decided I’d rather tell Beth. “Between the two of us.” Not a question.

Beth nodded.

“Pulling that trigger is one of the five most satisfying things I’ve ever done.”

 

Sideshow is available through Amazon in both print ($9.99) and e-book ($2.99) versions. 

Sideshow is (Finally) Available on Amazon

It took longer than expected due to reasons I won’t go into – mainly because they’re my fault – but the eighth Nick Forte PI novel, SIDESHOW, is now available in print and e-book formats on Amazon; Kindle Unlimited readers also have access. This is the hardest book I’ve ever tried to write, as I had to think about things I never had when writing any other book and I wanted to get them as close to right as possible.

 

The story opens with Forte’s return to Lake City to meet with Johnny Osgood, a televangelist who preaches what he calls “prosperity gospel,’ assuaging the consciences of those who want more than they need. A young woman employee of Osgood’s Lakeview Church, Elena Morales, stopped coming to work a few days ago. No one can contact her and people are worried.

 

Why this job needs to be under the table pricks Forte’s radar, not enough to turn down the work. Finding Elena is not difficult, but what he learns, and some of what he doesn’t, bothers him enough to leave her with his card and an invitation to call him if she ever needs anything.

 

Of course, she does. (Wouldn’t be much of a book if she didn’t, right?) What she calls him about, and what happens because of it, are what you’ll have to read the book to find out. I can tell you that along the way Forte spends time with

·         His daughter Caroline.

·         His friend and “debt collector” Goose Satterwhite.

·         His cop friend Jan Rusiewicz, now a lieutenant in charge of Area Five Violent Crimes.

·         Bobby Catlett, a detective under Jan’s command.

·         Steve Miller, Osgood’s right-hand man.

·         A therapist.

·         An intersex woman.

·         A gay detective.

·         A transgender woman detective.

·         A bartender who may end up being more than someone who serves draft beer and chicken wings.

SIDESHOW took me longer to write than any other book if we don’t count the time spent researching the Western. I think it was worth the effort. You’ll have to be the judge of whether I’m right. It’s available in both print ($9.99) and e-book ($2.99) formats on Amazon. 

I'm Old and I Read What I Want

This is probably going to irritate some people, but I’m old, which means I don’t give a fuck.

 Last week Rob Hart posted in Substack a piece titled, “DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL, why TWILIGHT is good actually, and the importance of reading bestsellers.” Rob is a helluva writer and a friend of mine. It’s always a good idea to listen to what he has to say. One of the best and most useful bits of writing advice I ever received came from him at Left Coast Crime in 2025 when he suggested an edit from back to front of a novel. I’ve done that for a couple of books now and it works great. Rob’s rationale was that it avoids the fatigue that comes as the end approaches in any edit; I also found it helps me to fix things that were not adequately prepared, as I don’t have to go back looking for them. They’re still ahead of me.

 I have enormous respect for Rob as a writer and as a person. With that in mind, I can still say three things with certainty:

1.      I’m not going to read Dungeon Crawler Carl.

2.      What I know about Twilight means I’m not going to read any of those.

3.      I’m not slavering at the mouth to grab hold of the next bestseller.

 As Percy Garris (Strother Martin) said to Butch and Sundance, do you want to know why?

1.      I’m as close to 100 as I am to 40 and therefore officially old.

2.      I appreciate I have a finite amount of time remaining to read anything.

3.      I’ve been reading for over sixty years, and I know what I like.

4.      I’m not trying to build a career as a writer. That ship has not only sailed, it is beyond the horizon.

The first three are all that matter to me. I don’t want to hear what anyone thinks I should read or need to read; I already can’t keep up with what I want to read. I know I don’t want to read

1.      Books that mix sci-fi and fantasy with video game rules.

2.      Forbidden love (with monsters), eternal commitment (to monsters), a love triangle (with monsters), et cetera, et cetera (probably also involving monsters.) If I want to read about monsters, I have the Trump Administration.

3.      Bestsellers, with rare exceptions. I understand there is a skill, even a talent, in writing a bestseller, and that I lack it. I’m okay with that. The greatest musician this country has produced, Leonard Bernstein, once lamented his inability to write a hit popular song and admired those who could do so routinely. I find most bestsellers to be facile, strain credulity, and spend too much time on description and things I tend to skip. (Hat tip to Elmore Leonard.)

Which brings us to Number 4 on the second list above. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do what Rob suggests. If you’re trying to build a career, or even gain a foothold in the industry, these are things you should at least be aware of.

 I, on the other hand, have made a conscious decision to stop thinking about a career in any form. I have not changed the kinds of books I write and I’m not going to. I haven’t adapted how the books are written to maybe make them more popular, and I’m not going to. I write what I write because those are the kinds of books I like to read. Period.

 I’m also retired and well into the back nine of life. I can afford this attitude, which allows me to create lists of entities who, in the timeless words of Senator John Blutarsky, can kiss my ass from now on (I promise this is the final list of this post):

1.      The publishing industry.

2.      Agents.

3.      The Trump Administration.

4.      Booksellers who make it almost impossible for indie writers to get shelf space.

5.      Grammar Nazis

6.      The Trump Administration.

7.      Pedants of any stripe.

8.      People who don’t read.

9.      The Trump Administration, Natalie Harp in particular.

10.  The Trump Administration in general.

(You may detect a pattern there.)

 

Do not comment that I’m old and cranky. I know I’m old and cranky. My lifetime allotment of fucks to give ran out about the time I learned my publisher would not provide sales figures except in the annual “quarterly” reports I received, and I found errors in those. So take everything here with a grain of salt.

 

And get off my lawn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Going to See the Elephant

 My brother and I have a tradition of taking a ‘bro-trip” when either of us celebrates a birthday ending in zero. For his 50th we spent a weekend in Chicago; I used to live there and he’d never been. When he turned 60 we went to upstate New York to see the baseball Hall of Fame, then to the largest motocross race in the country, at Unadilla in New Berlin.

This year I turned 70 and had never been to Las Vegas. We took care of that earlier this month, the excuse being the country’s largest pool tournament running from August 4 – 9.

We stayed at the Flamingo, where my brother’s wife got us a stupid cheap rate. (I think it was $218 for the three nights combined.) As neither of us are gamblers, the hotel took a bath.

I’d like to tell you all the cool things we did, but, you know, what happens in Vegas and all that. I can share some thoughts.

• You may not be aware of this, but Las Vegas is hotter than a dog’s balls on a griddle. No one was frying eggs on the sidewalk; they were roasting whole chickens. Highs were in the 110s every day we were there. The low each morning was 91.

• The food was outrageously expensive, but excellent. A Gordon Ramsey hamburger cost $26.95; it was also the best hamburger I ever ate. Bottled water at the hotel was six dollars. (In what was clearly an oversight, vending machines in the hotel sold the same water for only $3.10.) Beers were routinely $13 – $15. We did find a place that sold dollar wings and three-dollar drafts during happy hour. The wings were huge and excellent. If you’re in Vegas and want that combo, check out Bottled Blonde, across the street from Bellagio.

• The sports book at the Westgate is large, quiet, and comfortable. No one hassles you to spend money, and no bright lights are in your face. We came to view it as a sanctuary. Of course, we weren’t there during a football weekend.

• Speaking of sports books, you can get a bet down right now – today – on NFL games to be played in January. It’s safe to say anyone placing such a bet – not knowing how the season will play out or who might be hurt – is a degenerate gambler who should seek immediate assistance.

• As might be expected in a town where the sole industry is tourism, everyone we dealt with could not have been nicer, and it never seemed forced. The sole exception was a pissy blackjack dealer who was taciturn at best when I didn’t see the “$50 minimum” sign at her table and tried to get a twenty down. 

• Among these friendly people was an attractive young woman we met on The Linq Promenade, dressed in a cowboy hat, boots, chaps, and nothing else except for little spangly things over her nipples. She asked me if I wanted a picture with her. I replied, “Do I and will I are two different things.” She laughed and we went our separate ways.

• The monorail passes we bought the first day saved our lives, possibly literally, given the heat. We were able to tour the length of The Strip while never spending more than a few minutes at a time away from air conditioning. The two-day pass was the best $26 I spent all week.

The end result was about as I expected. I always enjoy time with my brother. We’re not just close; we genuinely enjoy each other’s company, even if we’re doing nothing more entertaining than riding the monorail or cooling off in the Westgate sports book. 

While I had more fun than anticipated – the tournament exceeded all expectations – now that I’ve been I see no reason to go back. I won’t go out of my way to avoid Vegas now that I know the niches where I’m comfortable, but it is the most ostentatious, extravagant example of profligate spending to be found outside of Saudi Arabia or Donald Trump’s bathroom. Several times each day I couldn’t help thinking any nation that can afford this kind of spectacle can afford to feed hungry children and make sure they and their grandparents have adequate health care.

Stu turns 70 in 2030. Embryonic plans are already under development.

Favorite Reads, Spring 2026

 I’m a little late with my Q2 list. That doesn’t mean I had trouble finding books to recommend. On the contrary, it was a good quarter.

 The Big Empty, Robert Crais. I’ve been a fan of Crais’s work for over twenty years. His consistency is such I’m hard pressed to say which of his Elvis Cole books is my favorite. Until now. The Big Empty is the work of a master of the craft at the peak of his powers. Not only is this a compelling story with characters as well drawn as any in the literature, Crais handles with aplomb things that cause even the best of writers to stumble, such shifting points of view and timelines. Even if you’re not typically a fan of PI fiction, do yourself a favor and read this one.

 Mirage City, Lev AC Rosen. A new voice to be reckoned with in the PI genre. Rosen sets his novel in the gay community of Los Angeles in the 1950s, when homosexuality was still a crime. The story is complex and well told, and Rosen never stoops to preaching. The issues of the time – more than a few of which still linger, though not officially – are described matter of factly to allow the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. Outstanding book. I’ll look for his earlier novel.

 Gray Dawn, Walter Mosley. There aren’t any compliments for Mosley’s Easy Rawlins novels that haven’t already been said, so I’ll leave it at this: Gray Dawn has everything one would expect from a Rawlins novel without seeming repetitious in any way. Easy’s family life evolves, but he still reaches back to former acquaintances for help when needed. His name may be misleading – things are never easy for Mr. Rawlins – but reading Mosley’s books is never a chore. The writing flows like water over a cliff. No oner does a better job of putting readers firmly in a place they’ve never been.

 Hatchet Girls, Joe Lansdale. Hap and Leonard ride again. I don’t know if there’s anything exceptional about this book when compared to the rest of the Hap and Leonard oeuvre – except maybe the premise – but the voice is so comforting and familiar to readers of the series that you feel like you’ve settled in with an old friend you haven’t seen for a while by the time you finish the first page.

 Crooks, Lou Berney. This book is currently on all kinds of award lists, and deservedly so. The story of a family of, well, crooks, who are proud of their heritage and happy to work together to enhance it. Berney’s writing is easy on the eyes and the story – stories, actually – each could stand alone as novellas. In Berney’s deft hands a framing story ties everything together as the children make their own ways after Mom and Dad had set their courses. Crooks proves a book can be great fun and still thought-provoking.

 At Their Own Game, Frank Zafiro. Why isn’t this guy better known? He’s worked on multiple crime series himself and collaborated on two others (that I know of) and I’m hard pressed to say one is better than the other. Usually a police procedural writer, At Their Own Game takes the POV of a cop turned criminal to examine both sides. The story is complex, with several twists I didn’t see coming until I found myself mumbling, “Of course,” though I never felt adrift. If you’re not familiar with Zafiro’s work, you’d be wise to take a look. Everything he writes is good.

 The Killing of the Tinkers, Ken Bruen. I picked this up at a used bookstore shortly after I heard of Bruen’s death. Two chapters in I realized I’d read it before but never thought of stopping. Jack Taylor is Jack Taylor, and sometimes Bruen makes him suffer more than he should, but Bruen’s ability to tell a tragic story with a little whimsy, and his unsurpassed control of the language, make everything he wrote a treat. His passing is a great loss.