Doris Lane

Modern day Americans have a love of genealogy and spend a great deal of time, energy and money pursuing what is an all out passion for our family histories. In the course of it, almost always, family secrets come tumbling out of time. In Edward Ball’s case, the fact that his family owned slaves was hardly a secret. The Balls owned nearly four thousand people for over 150 years, on more than twenty plantations. Ball’s family, far from forgetting or obscuring the fact, wore its slaveholding status proudly, passed stories of plantation slavery freely, deposited their business and personal papers in South Carolina archives for all the world to see.

Not spoken of, ever, was the blood kinship white Ball descendants shared with black ones.

For a white Staten Island, New York family, the news came as a thunderbolt the day they learned, from a reporter, that DNA testing of the remains of Thomas Jefferson showed their descent from this president of the United States and his slave mistress, Sally Hemings. For Edward Ball, the first inkling of his mixed race family came when he was a nine year old on a summer’s drive with his father and brother through the South Carolina rice plantation district.
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There have been 42 deaths of AIDS sufferers in New York and New Jersey. Two of them had their lips stitched closed. All of the dead have been treated with an experimental and illegal vaccine cocktail administered by Lucy Germaine. Saint Lucy she is called in the loop of dying people who believe any attempt at a cure is better than death.

She really is something of a saint, Lucy, a kind-hearted idealist who believes deeply in what she is doing. The medical radical is a Mohawk heroine who lives on Indian lands on the Lake of Two Mountains. Across the frozen solid lake in a Montreal suburb is the pharmaceutical lab where Lucy works. She ably recruits criminal assistants, steals a truck, and smuggles the precious serum across the ice and over the U.S. Canadian border.

When Lucy discovers her patients have been dying in her wake, she returns to Canada to learn why. Here begins a twister of a plot with some of the most sympathetic, yet monstrous characters to grace a page. The dialogue is delightful, quirky, and intelligent, no matter the class or education of the speaker. The writing is rich and the reading is fast.

The ice-ridden locale is ideal for the cold hearts at play here. The lake is a frozen wasteland where danger and confusion, snow and ice, compete in masking and unmasking and masking again a criminal conspiracy that is tundra vast. What we don’t know is this: Saint Lucy, dupe or conspirator?
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Falling in love with Smokey Dalton just may be the easiest fall you’ve ever taken. He’s handsome, he’s built, he’s smart, passionate, sensitive, and tough. His love interest is Laura Hathaway. She’s all those things; she’s just white and rich. But Smokey’s primary love, the one that comes ahead of everything else in his trouble-strewn life, is for ten-year-old Jimmy Bailey. Smokey is saving himself as he attempts to save Jimmy. At Jimmy’s age, Smokey’s parents were both lynched and he was spirited away from Atlanta for his own protection. Through Jimmy, the adult Smokey is able to confront his own buried (and crippling) feelings of fear, loss, guilt, and anger. Jimmy makes Smokey whole as a man.

In the first installment in this most compelling series, A Dangerous Road, Jimmy witnesses the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis and the killer is not James Earl Ray. Jimmy, abandoned by his prostitute mother and then by his teenaged brother, finds a willing protector and father figure in Smokey Dalton, the college-educated Korean War veteran who works as an unlicensed PI. Smokey takes charge of Jimmy, abandons his home and business in Memphis, to save the child from certain death by the conspirators in Dr. King’s murder. But, oh my, where to go? Well, Laura Hathaway happens to live up there in Chicago. But events rearing up out of Laura’s family past put formidable obstacles in the way of any reunion of lovers.

And, of course, it is 1968, a year of assassinations and politics. Chicago is very, very crowded, what with secret service, FBI, anti-war activists, hippies, Yippies, and other outside agitators assembled for the Democratic National Convention. Mayor Daley’s police batons are in full swing. Smokey and Jimmy are living underground with a family in a black neighborhood in Smoke Filled Rooms, Smokey has taken the name Bill Grimshaw and is working as a hotel security guard. Smokey hears he is being shadowed in the neighborhood. Black boys start turning up dead. Smokey realizes he has to get Jimmy to a safe place. Until now, Smokey’s pride has kept him away from the wealthy Laura in her lake-view penthouse. For Jimmy’s sake he swallows it, and enlists her help in protecting his son. It is an old and dangerous enemy who threatens Smokey and all he loves. It takes all the strength Smokey can muster to defeat him. Defeat him he does in a fashion that allows our hero to show of what true grit is made.

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If I were Victor Gischler, my second novel would be published posthumously.

Gischler wrote a first novel on and off for years, running through six agents who rejected him and it. UglyTown published the book, Gun Monkeys, in 2001. UglyTown is the cool and lovely L. A. small press with kick-ass production values. Next, Gun Monkeys was nominated for the 2002 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel in 2001. Then it was a finalist for that Edgar Award. Gun Monkeys didn’t win the Edgar, but Gischler won a hardcover contract from Bantam Dell for his second novel, The Pistol Poets, due out in 2003.

I’ll be wrapped in a shroud.
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They say nothing sells a book like its cover. Design Image Group is a graphic design firm turned publisher, and it shows. In 1998, Design Image introduced a Supernatural Horror Line in trade paperback, adding in 2001 a Dark Mystery Line for neo-noir, hardboiled, retro pulp, and crime fiction. Every last Design Image cover is a striking example of art noir: darkly elegant, sophisticated, and simply beautiful. Design Image published the new Joe Hannibal in the series by Wayne D. Dundee. Get a load of the cover on And Flesh and Blood so Cheap.

The Big Switch cover got the full Design Image treatment: Sleek and sexy in shades of mauve; the femme at the widow looking out on a shadowy urban view; the burning cigarette held by a hand ending in sharp nails painted a delicate pink; a subtle strip of celluloid and countdown of scene numbers. And we know we’re in hardboiled city before we crack the binding.

Jack Bludis gives us a fast-paced, down and dirty ride through the mud puddle that was post-WWII Hollywood, with a touch of madcap along the way. The casting couch is all full up. Starlets are drugged and set up in smut shoots. Everybody’s partying, boozing, and smoking, making movies, making money, and making each other. The studio morals clause is hanging over stellar heads, not that it’s putting a crimp in anybody’s style. Life is cheap, sex is dear, and blackmail is the big easy. Read the rest of this entry »