The Voice, The Hands, and Rattlesnake Rodeo is the story of Nick Kolakowski. Many of you know Kolakowski from his loveable online persona and his exciting, fast-paced fiction. Unfortunately, that could not be further from the truth. This public face is a mask. The majority of Kolakowski’s crime fiction is autobiographical. Below is the story…
David Joy returns with a fierce and tender tale of a father, an addict, a lawman, and the explosive events that come to unite them. Opiates steal thousands of souls every day. A modern pestilence, that feels biblical. In North Carolina, in 2018, an estimated 79% of drug overdose deaths involved opioids. During the same…
Lost River by J. Todd Scott is a blistering crime novel on the opioid epidemic—featuring its cops, villains, and victims—written by a 25-year veteran of the DEA. As a crime-fiction aficionado, have you ever hoped Don Winslow and James Ellroy read Hillbilly Elegy and then decided to co-write a police procedural that is an exposé…
“COVID-19 promises to alter us all in strange ways. It’s a paradigm-shifting event that divides lives and cultures into a before and after. We will emerge changed, though how those changes will manifest is far from certain. The sensory details of this outbreak—the masks, the faces of doctors and nurses creased with worry and fatigue,…
Stone Cross by Marc Cameron opens in a remote Alaskan village where Deputy US Marshal Arliss Cutter searches for a stone-cold killer amid a hotbed of corruption, lies, and long-buried secrets. As a boy, I loved playing cops and robbers with my brothers. We ran through the pine trees, shooting finger guns, and wearing paint-thinner-scented…
My new commute is long and painful. The only positive aspect is that my auditory crime-book consumption has shot through the roof. Recently I picked up The Sisters by Dervla McTiernan, narrated by Aoife McMaon. This is a novella from the Cormac Reilly Series, technically number .5. It is a prequel to McTiernan’s bestseller The…
A recent transfer to Atlanta, and the resulting ninety-minute commute, led me down an audio content rabbit hole. My first venture into this world was Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. As the winner of the Booker of Bookers, Rushdie’s sprawling magical fiction merits its own review. With that said, I learned Midnight’s Children is not…
