R.I.P.D. City of the Damned by Jeremy Barlow, Peter M.Lenkov, and Tony Parker is an anthology billed as a prequel to the R.I.P.D. comic book series and the upcoming feature film starring Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds (available May 28, 2013).
This second collection of R.I.P.D. comic books, based on characters created by Peter M. Lenkov, continues the narrative established in the successful first volume which is soon to be immortalized in film with Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds in starring roles. In City Of The Damned, Roy Pulsipher and Nick Walker are chasing down errant souls for the R.I.P.D. when they come across a place from Roy’s past, a place he has no interest in dragging his new partner into. So Roy plunges into danger alone, warning Nick to turn back, and takes the reader a century into the past, when he himself was first recruited to the R.I.P.D.
Roy’s first memory of his afterlife is of trudging helplessly through the desert while being menaced by a literal dark cloud.
I tend to get on kicks. I ran through Homeland Season 1 in three days and then moved on. I became obsessed with baseball for a summer and then moved on (mostly). I spent one summer in high school reading every Ian Fleming and Doc Savage book ever. And then I moved on. I saved all of John le Carré’s novels until this last winter. And then I read them all back to back. And I’ve moved on. Now I’m reading every book I can find on the history of Special Operations throughout history. And I’m sure I’ll move on.
Smarty Bones by Carolyn Haines is lucky number thirteen in the Sarah Booth Delaney humorous private eye series (available May 21, 2013).
As a kid I, along with most of the rest of the country, watched the made-for-TV movie Born Innocent. If you don’t know that film, it’s a 1974 title that stars Linda Blair as a once “normal” teenage girl who, mostly due to her parents’ cruel indifference, goes down a path that leads to the hell of life inside a girls’ reform school. At that time I wasn’t familiar with the concept of camp entertainment, or that there were whole subgenres within that realm that had to do with babes behind bars and reform school girls. Born Innocent was just the big TV movie that everybody was talking about that week, and it starred that girl who’d been in The Exorcist, and I wanted to see it.
HBO recently announced it was picking up a 7-part series called Criminal Justice starring James Gandolfini as an “ambulance-chasing New York City attorney who gets in over his head when he takes on the case of a Pakistani accused of murdering a girl on the Upper West Side,” according to 
Cuts Through Bone by Alaric Hunt is a contemporary PI novel in the classic PI novel style (available May 14, 2013).
In Shotgun Lullaby by Steve Ulfelder, Conway Sax must help a recovering substance abuser who reminds him a little too much of his estranged son (available May 14, 2013). 
They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, well with Kate Bufton that is certainly true! She sees books as much more than a mere storage area for words and ideas, but as the starting point for some incredible pieces of artwork.
For years, absinthe was considered far more dangerous than most liquors. In fact, it was banned in both the United States and the EU for nearly a century due to its alleged hallucinogenic qualities. But in fact, it appears that the absinthe itself—the distilled spirit of wormwood—was not responsible for the problems faced by early drinkers. No, the blame would fall to adulterants in either the cheaper forms of the drink or in the mixers.
The Healer by Antti Tuomainen is a novel of dystopian, futuristic Nordic noir (available May 14, 2013).
Double Whammy by Gretchen Archer is the first Davis Way Crime Caper novel, a humorous mystery set in Biloxi, Mississippi (available May 14, 2013).
When I was in high school, the British hard rock band Deep Purple scored a huge comeback hit with the song “Knocking at Your Back Door,” the lead single from their album Perfect Strangers. During the song, a man visits various women, from strippers to aristocrats, late at night and knocks at their back door per their invitation. Obviously, I thought at the time—it’s a song about sex, about illicit sex, maybe even a certain kind of illicit sex. I was a teenager. Every song was about sex. And pretty much all sex was illicit. I didn’t need much help getting there, especially listening to a song that actually used the phrase “cunning linguist.” Even those few ’80s songs that weren’t about sex sure sounded like it to me.
