The Story Behind the Story: “Killer in a Box,” by David Thayer

(Editor’s note: In this 38th contribution to The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series, we hear from author and sometime Rap Sheet contributor David Thayer, a native of Niagara Falls, New York, who now lives in the Seattle area. Thayer has published three e-book thrillers (with a fourth on the way), all featuring Manhattan police detective Armand DiPino. Below, he explains some of the background to the first entry in that series, Killer in a Box.)

For me the story of writing a novel is told by the first draft. I don’t use an outline, so I’ve learned to compensate by writing first drafts that become narrative outlines crammed with crazy scenes, discarded characters, vignettes, sidebars, and parts of future novels to be set aside. I took the original version of Killer in a Box to a writer’s conference where it was nominated for an award. That was fun, but four years later I was still rewriting, trying to find the sweet spot between what I thought I was doing and what was actually happening on the page.

The story is set at the time of the Euro conversion. I read an article in The New York Times about people with vast piles of legacy currency rushing to the meet the deadline. They had to bring their Deutschmarks, francs, lira, and pesetas to designated banks or the money would become worthless. I thought this idea would be a great setup for a crime novel, a powerful motivator for the villains.

The main character, Armand DiPino, is a young detective assigned to Midtown North in Manhattan. I chose the location because I used to live just south of Hell’s Kitchen. DiPino is a native Californian; his parents are professors who moved to New York City when he was in high school. Throughout the book DiPino tries to stay in touch with his family. His wife, Patti, died in a hit-and-run four years earlier. The void in his life cannot be filled by long hours at work.

Killer in a Box opens with a sustained gunfight between police and what appears to be a group of men in military garb. The NYPD responds by adopting an urban combat plan creating a grid of evacuated streets they call a box. Once the perimeter of the box is secure, the police send in a scout--in this case, DiPino. This shootout on the West Side leaves multiple cops dead and wounded. Richard Fast, a prominent lawyer, also dies in the melee, gunned down on Tenth Avenue next to his late-model Mercedes.

DiPino emerges as a hero credited with saving the life of a fellow officer while shooting dead a suspect in an alley.

The NYPD is wary of their new poster boy, however. DiPino doesn’t fit the mold; he’s tainted by his time in Patrol, suspected of being part of a corrupt ring of cops known as the 8-9 Pad, so called because street taxes were collected on the eighth and ninth days of the month. DiPino is assigned to the shootout investigating team, which is commanded by an inspector named Rinaldo Beladon. Beladon belongs to the Internal Affairs Bureau. He knew Patti. He cleaned up the 8-9 Pad. Now he’s interested in DiPino.

Killer in a Box could have been written in the first-person. Instead, I chose a tight third-person point of view that keeps the focus on DiPino. As he learns more about the shootout, and also more about the past, the reader is right there with him every step of the way. The death of Richard Fast leads DiPino to discover that Fast had represented officers indicted in the 8-9 Pad scandal, and to an Uzbek crime family that has millions of German Marks to exchange for the newly formed euro currency. Making that connection proves crucial for DiPino on a very personal level; it moves the story toward the crime within the crime, toward discovering Patti DiPino’s real history. Patti was a civilian employee of the police department, working as an assistant to a precinct commander who was indicted after her death. That’s what DiPino has believed--until he discovers that Internal Affairs had an undercover officer inside the 8-9 Pad.

As the plot lines merge between past and present DiPino throws the rules aside, provoking his bosses and the criminals who are growing more desperate as the conversion deadline looms. Tensions between DiPino and his partner, Mickey Reidel, reach an explosive level. Mickey is the senior detective, one of the elite First Grade in the Detective Bureau. Mickey made DiPino walk the box in the opening shootout scene. He withheld backup, and then led them into a confrontation with a mobster named Frankie Maggavero, a key figure in the currency heist--and a suspect in Fast’s murder. Mickey is crazy with jealousy, tied to Richard Fast’s widow, Ellen Houk. Ellen had a child with Mickey years earlier, a secret that could get him dismissed from the force.

Like most crime novels, Killer in a Box deals with lives in crisis. DiPino has to confront the truth about his marriage to Patti and his complicity in her death. What he discovers about her demise leads to the most knee-buckling scene in this novel. During a meeting at a cop bar called The Squire, a disgraced officer warns DiPino that he is being set up for a hit. Not by mobsters, but by his fellow police officers. Incredulous at first, DiPino follows the informant’s advice: “Don’t go out the back door when you leave. Use the front door.”

After exiting The Squire, DiPino circles the block. The rear entrance to the bar is staked out by two men--one of them a cop, the other a retired cop, Bill McCaffrey. Patti’s father. Shocked and angry, DiPino follows McCaffrey home to Far Rockaway to the same house where Patti grew up, the neighborhood they planned to live in after they had kids.

(Right) Author David Thayer

Her own father? For DiPino, discovering the truth is devastating, but he presses on, flushing out Patti’s killer through a series of bold moves that threaten to push him beyond the limits any police officer must respect.

Because this is the first book in a series, I wanted to set up the characters without diluting the story or loading up on back story. I’ve written four DiPino books now, and I think they can each stand alone if read out of order. That’s my intent: that each of the novels is complete with front story pushing the pace, rather than worrying about what’s happened in the previous books. In The Working Dead, the third book in the series (following Red Mountain), we leave New York for DiPino’s hometown of San Francisco; the as-yet-unpublished fourth book, Crazy People, is a prequel, in a sense, because it has DiPino working with Mickey Reidel again on a homicide case.

Writers know they have to make many decisions as they write, that there is a discipline that shapes and sometimes limits creativity. No two books are alike even if they include series characters; some go fast, some crawl, and none of mine have turned out the way I thought they would. Sometimes the characters really do take over and we experience our version of the runner’s high. At other times, the process is a slog. I guess the author’s trick is to not allow the reader to see those paragraphs that turned into blood-sucking leeches instead of smooth prose ...

That’s what rewrites are for.

(Author photograph by Brian Myers)

The Book You Have to Read: “Train,” by Pete Dexter

(Editor’s note: This is the 88th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection comes from infrequent Rap Sheet contributor David Thayer, who is also the author of his own blog. Thayer is represented by Stacia Decker at the Donald Maass Literary Agency for a novel called Black Forest.)

Since this is a part of a series about forgotten novels, you can assume a few things from the start. I liked this Pete Dexter book, and though it was published fairly recently (back in 2003) I thought it was worthy of a second glance.

Train received a lot of coverage after its publication, with major reviews appearing in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Boston Herald, and USA Today. The critiques were generally positive, although the Times reviewer found one of this story’s principal characters, police sergeant Miller Packard, to be rather clichéd as “The Mile Away Man.” Most reviewers mentioned the grim worldview Dexter puts forth and several complained about subplots that go nowhere. My thought is, Dexter spends the entire novel telling us that most plots go nowhere or end badly. That’s why this is such a great example of noir fiction.

The setting is Los Angeles in 1953. A couple of black men, caddies at the private Brookline Country Club, board a yacht, kill the owner, and rape his wife. Packard is the officer who responds, arriving on the scene just in time to put both criminals in handcuffs. Instead of carting them off to jail, though, he executes them and throws their bodies into the harbor. This excerpt shapes the scene:

A moment passed, and then the sergeant sighed and picked up the shotgun. He broke the breach to check the load, then closed it again. Arthur’s eyes opened at the sound. He began to sit up, and the shot tore away his shoulder and the side of his neck. He was strangely still for a moment. A pink mist floated out behind him, and then gravity took his head sideways and down, in the direction of the missing part of his neck. There were tiny noises as bits and pieces fell into the water.

The dead men had recognized Packard from the country club as a golfer who always specifies the caddy he wants, Lionel Walk, a teenager whose nickname is Train. After Packard disposes of those yacht killers, the novel sheds most of the conventions of the crime genre--likable protagonist, good versus evil--to explore an amoral man’s enthusiasms.

Norah Rose, the surviving victim of the recent yacht attack, seems content to drift into Packard’s orbit. Her claim to fame is that she lives in a house that once survived the crash of a Howard Hughes aircraft--a cunning metaphor for the battle-damaged enclave of West Los Angeles. Norah’s life is a construct of careful liberalism (she supports America’s nascent civil-rights movement) and blinding fear. When Train eventually moves onto her property with his deranged friend, Nora’s abstract racial tolerance falls victim to her fantasy fear obsession, triggered by this new proximity to black strangers.

Miller Packard takes Train under his wing, turns him into his prodigy, and mounts a one-man Professional Golf Association tour. Train is a legendary talent on the golf course, a caddy who’s far more gifted at the game than the wealthy white men who bet money against him. Packard is Pete Dexter’s notion of a sophisticated racist, a man who sees things as they are and figures out how to play the angles for personal gain. There are subtleties in the relationship between Packard and Train that hint at caring, just as there are nuances of love between Packard and Norah. Ultimately, though, Packard’s sheer viciousness prohibits anything like happiness. He has a restless need for destruction and the novel’s conclusion stays true to Packard’s damaged character.

READ MORE: “The Book You Have to Read: God’s Pocket, by Pete Dexter,” by David Corbett (The Rap Sheet).

Twin Sweep

“The Mirror’s Edge is a not a pebble against the glass, but more like a boulder catapulted by a gifted writer who hits the bulls-eye in scene after scene,” January Magazine critic David Thayer enthuses about Steven Sidor’s latest novel before announcing, “This is one of my favorite books of the year.”

So, what of the book’s plot? It focuses around a Chicago freelance writer named Jase Deering, who involves himself with the sensational daylight kidnapping of twin boys from their parents’ suburban home. Deering, whose own older brother “vanished in the woods long ago,” becomes obsessed with this kidnapping, risking his relationship with significant other Robyn Matchfrost as he falls into the dangerous orbit of an occult-associated family. “This is a novel in which character and plot fuse in a natural progression, a tough, sometimes brutal chain of mayhem that the author controls completely,” writes Thayer.

The full review can be found here.

Shadow Players

This is working out to be quite a summer for Brent Ghelfi. The Phoenix, Arizona-based lawyer, businessman, and now thriller writer recently saw his first novel, Volk’s Game (2007), released in stylish paperback form. And early this coming month, the sequel, Volk’s Shadow (Henry Holt), is set to reach bookstores in the States. In both works, the protagonist is gun-for-hire Alexei Volkovoy, aka “Volk,” a man with a prosthetic leg, a mean streak, and an instinct for survival that was honed in blood-soaked Chechnya. No less than Lee Child described Volk’s Game as “hard, fast, and a truly excellent debut.”

I caught up with Ghelfi shortly before he embarked on his latest tour, and had the opportunity to ask him a few questions.

David Thayer: First of all, congratulations on your Barry Award nomination. How gratifying is that kind of recognition for you?

Brent Ghelfi: I was thrilled when I saw the Barry Award nomination. Volk’s Game is so different is so many ways--it’s present-tense style, [with a] modern-day Russian setting and, of course, a violent, brooding protagonist--that the nomination was an unexpected surprise. I’m truly grateful to be included in the company of the other nominees.

DT: I read somewhere that your main character, Alexei Volkovoy, got his name from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963). The character of Volkovoi in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel was a prison guard. Do you see Volk as a prisoner of the New Russia?

BG: I think of the prison guard in Solzhenitsyn’s story as a metaphor for Stalinist Russia: cruel, hard-bitten, [and] wasteful of Russia’s most precious asset, her people. I see Volk as less a prisoner and more a representative of the new Russia: conflicted about the past, damaged by war, crime, and corruption. Two decades on the crack pipe of political and economic transformation have left their mark on Russia, and Volk is both a product of his environment and, like millions of other ordinary Russians, one of the architects of it.

DT: Valya is my favorite among Volk’s Game’s secondary characters. Is she a permanent fixture in your evolving series?

BG: I fell in love with Valya from the first line I wrote about her. Her background as a Chechen refugee opens any number of windows into Russia’s southern wars and its troubled history in the Caucasus (a few of which we peer through in the follow-up book, Volk’s Shadow). The more I explored Volk’s relationship with Valya, the more I realized that he couldn’t be one of those characters who hop from one bed to another. She’s his lover, guardian angel, and moral compass, and he’s bonded to her.

DT: This seems to be the year for first-rate thrillers set in Russia. Anna Blundy’s Vodka Neat comes to mind. Do you read others in your genre?

BG: Scanning my recently read shelf, I see in no particular order: James Lee Burke, Gayle Lynds, Greg Iles, Walter Mosley, Alan Furst, Naomi Hirahara, Ken Bruen, Mo Hayder, James Sallis, Lee Child, Robert Crais, Michael Connelly, Colin Harrison, and John le Carré (I recently reread The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; novels just don’t get much better than that one). I don’t necessarily look for books set in or about Russia, although a few that I’ve read recently are Ronan Bennett’s Zugzwang, Amy Bloom’s Away, and, of course, Martin Cruz Smith’s latest, Stalin’s Ghost.

DT: Volk’s Game, as you noted before, is written the present tense. How did you decide on that approach to the story?

BG: The idea for Volk’s Game came to me early one morning while looking down on Red Square from a fourth-floor balcony at the National Hotel. I saw a man in a black overcoat making his way across the deserted square, walking quickly but with a slight limp. He cut through the barricades and past the soldiers guarding Lenin’s Tomb without showing any identification, then disappeared so suddenly he seemed to have been swallowed by the walls of the Kremlin. Wondering who he was, I wrote the sentence that characterized Volk: “Dead mother, disappeared father, late-era Soviet poverty, and five years of killing and worse in Chechnya ...” From that moment on, the character--and later, the story--seemed to demand the aggressive, in-your-face style of present tense.

DT: You changed settings from Moscow to Prague and New York during the novel. Any plans to relocate Volk for future books?

BG: The second Volk book, Volk’s Shadow, is set mostly in Moscow, with a few scenes in the high mountains on the Dagestan/Chechnya border. The book I’m working on now takes Volk to Albuquerque and Los Angeles to investigate the Moscow murder of a Hollywood film producer and its connection to Volk’s missing father, a Cold War defector.

DT: Many of The Rap Sheet’s readers are writers themselves. So they’ll be interested to hear how you go about getting the words down on the page.

BG: Painfully. I’m laughing, but it still hurts. The best advice I’ve heard is to write every day, compulsively, so that’s what I do when I’m working on a first draft. I think it was Elmore Leonard who said he skips the boring parts, and I try to do that, too, so that the excitement and anticipation of each scene carry me through a day’s work. Once the first draft is finished, of course, I revise, revise, revise.

DT: A lot of reviewers found Volk’s Game very visually oriented, cinematic. Any interest in your from Hollywood yet?

BG: The movie rights have been optioned, so I have my fingers crossed. I recently wrote a piece for My Book, the Movie where I dreamed about who might star in and direct the film.

(Author photo by Mike Eller.)

The Land of Unintended Consequences

“Atmosphere is one of the hallmarks of the classic thriller, an aspect of suspense that is all too often sacrificed from the recipe for modern-day thrillers. Alex Carr--a pseudonym used by Virginia novelist Jenny Siler (Flashback, Shot)--wants to remind her readers that mystery can be found in the most ordinary places, where her characters suddenly find themselves prisoners of circumstance.”

So begins David Thayer’s review--posted today in January Magazine--of The Prince of Bagram Prison, Siler’s second paperback thriller under the Carr nom de plume (following last year’s The Accidental American). It’s a quite complex tale Siler/Carr sets out to tell in this new book, with many of the cause-and-effect linkages blurred throughout her narrative. But Thayer does an excellent job of defining the high points of this novel’s story line--the political imprisonment of a Moroccan woman, an orphan from Casablanca’s sometimes desperate efforts to stay alive, and the connivances of a CIA director who is anxious to cover up a torture scandal in Afghanistan.

As Thayer writes, “The Prince of Bagram Prison goes beyond the formulaic thriller to examine the life cycle of a failed ideal: that good intentions prevail, despite all evidence to the contrary.”

His full critique can be found here.

Diamonds in the Rough

Commenting on Cuban crime fictionist José Latour’s new novel, January Magazine critic David Thayer writes: “Mystery fans may complain, but Hidden in Havana has greater ambitions than the average whodunit.” That isn’t to suggest that this genre lacks ambition or excellence--not at all. But Latour does want his book about a search for secreted gems and the awakening of a young woman to the deceptions around her to serve as a doorway into the lives of his characters, as much as it works as a mystery tale.

Thayer introduces the players here succinctly:

A blind expatriate named Carlos Consuegra dispatches two people, Marina Leucci and Sean Abercorn, to Havana. Marina is Argentine, while Sean is American, a Vietnam vet with a Special Ops background. Their mission is to meet a brother and sister who’ve lived their entire lives in the same apartment in the Cuban capital. Posing as a married couple, they win the confidence of Elena Miranda and her brother, Pablo. Elena is a teacher, her brother a low-life. To further complicate this family’s strange dynamic, Elena and Pablo are the children of a legendary Cuban general who’s serving time for murder in their country’s special prison for fallen heroes.

From there the book’s plot becomes a tangle of seduction, murder, and ultimately realization, at least on lovely Elena Miranda’s part. “José Latour bends a few rules,” Thayer explains, “while managing to unroll a yarn that’s grounded in a realistic portrayal of Havana as it is today, coupled with an undertone of romantic escapism as he traces Elena’s improbable triumph as a woman of the world.”

You’ll find the full review here.

Mr. Palmer’s Neighborhood

Michigan-born Chicago wordsmith Marcus Sakey’s first novel, The Blade Itself (2007), received some phenomenally good press, including a pick by Esquire magazine as one of the “Year’s 5 Best Reads.” But in his review of this author’s new sophomore novel, At the City’s Edge, January Magazine contributing editor David Thayer says that Sakey’s efforts “to re-create the magic of his debut work” have brought “mixed results.”

The story builds around Jason Palmer, a former soldier “recently returned from George W. Bush’s Iraq war with a less than honorable discharge and a series of flashbacks to the encounter with insurgents that cost him his career.” Jason was hoping to find some welcome peace at home, but instead finds himself in the middle of a complex plot involving avaricious real-estate speculators, crooked politicians, and neighborhood gangsters. His brother, Michael, has already become a casualty of this scheming. And now it falls to Jason and a woman cop angling for some professional redemption to protect his sibling’s 8-year-old son--who saw Michael’s killers--from being kidnapped and killed, too.

Reviewer Thayer seems impressed by Sakey’s characters and the mystery story pacing he establishes in At the City’s Edge. But, he concludes, it’s “a mystery somewhat lacking in credibility.”

You can read all of January’s review here.

Wrong Gun for Hire

How does a broken young assassin-for-hire escape the killing business? It’s no easy matter, as the protagonist discovers in British author Kevin Wignall’s latest U.S. release, Who Is Conrad Hirst? In his review of that new novel, posted this morning in January Magazine, David Thayer explains:

Conrad makes a list of the people who stand in the way of his plans. Four men, all of them complicit in the killing for hire, contractors and subcontractors in the architecture of death. Only four men who know his identity--he must do away with them all. He reasons that his one-man blitz on [his employer, German crime boss Julius] Eberhardt’s organization will set him on a new course and restore meaning to his life. This is the quest that’s so central to this novel: Conrad’s relentless effort to experience his own humanity.

But of course such a simply plan is bound to go awry, in part because the certainties of Hirst’s life and job are not so certain, after all. Who is he really working for, and what do they demand of him now? Although Thayer says that Wignall’s fourth novel (after For the Dogs, 2004) boasts a “somewhat vexing structure,” he can’t complain about the “major plot twist that comes at the end of its main story.” And he’s quite impressed with what the author makes of his protagonist’s principal conceit:

For all of the story’s violence, this novel has a meditative quality and makes a serious effort to explore the injured psyche of a dangerous man. Beneath the minimalist style and curt descriptions there is a romantic belief that the search for meaning will restore Conrad to a community of people on whom he had turned his back.

You can read all of Thayer’s review here.

Restless in Uppsala

“I haven’t seen this many Swedish names since the closing credits of an Ingmar Bergman film,” January Magazine’s David Thayer quips today in his review of Kjell Eriksson’s second English-translated crime novel, The Cruel Stars of the Night.

Eriksson tends to fill his books (including his earlier, critically praised work, The Princess of Burundi) with extensive casts of cops, much as Ed McBain did with his own 87th Precinct stories. Yet most of the action in Cruel Stars concentrates around single mother and inspector Ann Lindell of the Violent Crimes Unit of Sweden’s Uppsala police department. In these pages, she must simultaneously look for a vanished professor, figure out who’s responsible for the apparently motiveless murders of two elderly gents, and deal with the professor’s 35-year-old daughter, a woman whose mental state is rapidly deteriorating--becoming a danger not only to the married man she fancies from work, but ultimately to Lindell herself.

Read all of Thayer’s assessment here.

Full Steam Ahead!

“While sensible men set out to be bankers, lawyers, business tycoons, or president of the United States, my brother had what was, in his mind, a far loftier goal. He wanted to be a detective.” So explains Otto “Big Red” Amlingmeyer in On the Wrong Track, Steve Hockensmith’s second contribution to the subgenre of western mysteries. As in Hockensmith’s debut novel, the well-reviewed Holmes on the Range (2006), Otto and his elder brother, Gustav--aka Old Red--once again find themselves solving murders and other crimes in the mode of Gustav’s “deducifying” idol, Sherlock Holmes. Only now, as David Thayer explains today in a January Magazine review, they’re working as undercover “law enforcers” on the Southern Pacific Railroad, trying to stop a gang of thieves known as the Give-’em-Hell Boys.

There’s nothing easy about that assignment. “[O]ur heroes aren’t on the job for long, bound from Utah to San Francisco, before they discover a human head beneath the Pacific Express train’s undercarriage,” Thayer writes. “That this particular noggin was once the mortal property of an S.P. employee assigned to the baggage car is an early indicator of what a long strange trip the Brothers Amlingmeyer face on their way west.” However, Big Red and Old Red ultimately prove they’re up to the task. Thayer says that Hockensmith, employing a combination of humor, red herrings, and oddball characters, delivers in On the Wrong Track a second novel that actually rivals his first.

Read his whole review here.

Banquo’s Ghost Goes Covert

A “cleaner” for the CIA. A deceased former agent who remains “a surprisingly lively comrade” and confidante. The use of hallucinatory drugs in Native American religious rituals and for interrogation purposes. All of these ingredients and many more figure into The Echelon Vendetta, a debut thriller by a pseudonymous former soldier and intelligence officer who calls himself David Stone. Critiquing the novel today in January Magazine, David Thayer writes that it “made critic Janet Maslin's list of Da Vinci Code clones in a recent New York Times article. But it doesn’t really belong there. This author had something more interesting in mind.”

Read Thayer’s whole review here.

Not the Sharpest Knives in the Drawer

Today in January Magazine, critic David Thayer inspects the brightness and sharpness of The Blade Itself, the debut novel from “Killer Year” author Marcus Sakey. “The set-up of The Blade Itself is simple,” explains Thayer. “Two childhood friends, Danny Carter and Evan McGann, plan to rob a pawnshop.” But nothing else about this new book is so simple, as Sakey explores issues of trust, honesty, temptation, and personal values. “The promise of his debut effort bodes well for this novelist, and for readers, too,” concludes Thayer. “Sakey is another gifted wordsmith exploring the urban terrain he knows and so obviously loves.”

Read the full review here.

Dyer Straights

“In Dyer County, Nevada, FBI Special Agent Mike Yeager is running from the tragic results of a child-kidnapping case he recently mishandled back in Philadelphia,” writes David Thayer in his new January Magazine review of The Shadow Catchers, a novel by Thomas Lakeman. “He thinks a trip to southern Nevada to photograph the Sangre de los Niños Mountains at sunset might help him forget that investigation as well as the woman--fellow agent Peggy Weaver--he left behind. But Yeager has chosen a harsh environment in which to rekindle his spirit.” And there’s little chance of his finding peace out West, as his pursuit of a missing girl makes him a murder suspect and unearths events from the past that locals are most eager to keep buried. Thayer concludes, “This is an impressive debut novel from a writer with a great deal to add to the crime-fiction canon.”

Read the whole review here.

Starr’s New Ballgame

In January Magazine today, David Thayer reviews Jason Starr’s new noir crime thriller.

In Lights Out, the return of a star baseball player to his Brooklyn neighborhood provides the set-up for a story about love, jealousy, arrogance, and faithlessness. Lights Out, remarks Thayer, “is the kind of cautionary tale young people should read before they set off in quest of fame and fortune.”

The review is here.

Now Entering Pelecanos Country

“George Pelecanos writes his stories from the ground up. Setting is more than background in his latest standalone, The Night Gardener, where the neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., are as integral to the storyline as the characters,” remarks David Thayer, in his first book review for January Magazine. “Covering the decades between the Reagan era and now, this novel is an informal history of powder cocaine's progression to crack and the violence that has destroyed a generation of black families in the process.”

Read Thayer’s full critique of The Night Gardener here.

Mansions and Murder

During an interview with blogger David Thayer, Shamus-winning novelist Daniel Judson is asked about setting his new novel, The Darkest Place, in the Hamptons area of East Long Island--a place usually associated with vacationing rich folks, not killers and private eyes. Judson responds:

There are back streets in every town, and Southampton is no exception. It just amazes me that some people refuse to believe that the East End of Long Island has a seedy underbelly simply because it’s a playground for the wealthy three months out of the year. Like the wealthy are somehow above crime. And Southampton really isn’t all mansions and polo grounds. Working-class people live there year round--struggle to live there, to make a living and raise their kids and keep their homes. When I was out there I lived in border-line poverty, a wannabe writer scrambling to make rent. I saw my share of desperate people, felt my share of desperation. So for me writing about the back streets isn’t working against type, it’s telling it more or less how I saw it.

Read the whole interview here.