Ninety years ago the Toomey brothers, along with twenty-five other men and four thousand head of cattle, vanished en route to Arizona. When writer and historian Dan Sheridan is invited to the missing brothers’ ranch by its current owner, he jumps at the chance. The visit fits right in with his plan to solve the century-old mystery—but it turns out that his host isn’t a fan of books, writers, or people who don’t mind their own business. Soon Dan is living the dangers of the Old West firsthand—tracked through the savage wilderness by vicious killers straight out of the most violent pages of his stories. However, his enemies have made one serious mistake: Sheridan is no pencil-pushing greenhorn, and killing him won’t be as easy as they think.

The brutal slayings of the Alvarez brothers follow an announcement by western fiction writer Dan Sheridan that he is investigating the strange disappearance of twenty men and four thousand head of cattle ninety years earlier

"Pearl's mother took her away from her family just weeks after she was born, and drove off to central Florida determined to begin a new life for herself and her daughter--in the parking lot next to a trailer park. Pearl grew up in the front seat of their '94 Mercury, while her mother lived in the back. Despite their hardships, mother and daughter both adjusted to life, making friends with the residents of the trailers and creating a deep connection to each other"--Amazon.com.

2018 Shamus Award Finalist: A “tricky and delightfully surprising crime novel” set at the dawn of the digital age in San Francisco (Publishers Weekly). It’s 1997, and the dotcom boom is going strong in San Francisco. But ex-journalist and struggling alcoholic David “Itchy” Crane's fledgling “information consultancy” business is getting slowly buried by bad luck, bad decisions, and the growing presence of the Internet. Before he can completely self-destruct, a private investigator offers him fifty grand to find a missing girl named Ashley. Crane takes the job because the money’s right and because the only clue to her disappearance is a dead-on oil portrait of Crane himself—painted by the mysterious missing girl whom he has never met. As Crane’s search for Ashley becomes an obsession, he stumbles upon a series of murders, for which he begins to fear he's being framed... “Spinelli deftly segues from one genre to another—from hard-boiled noir to paranoid thriller, puzzle mystery (with each and every riddle logically explained), spy caper, and ultimately to something evocative of Bogart and Bacall. Spinelli is definitely a talent to watch.”—Publishers Weekly “A neat little post-modern mash-up of Chandler and Hammett...[Spinelli’s] got wit and style up the wazoo.”—Thrilling Detective “The Painted Gun is hardboiled like they don’t make anymore. Whiplash twists, razor-sharp prose, an addictive narrative—I couldn’t read it fast enough.”—Rob Hart, author of The Warehouse

David Carr was an addict for more than twenty years -- first dope, then coke, then finally crack -- before the prospect of losing his newborn twins made him sober up in a bid to win custody from their crack-dealer mother. Once recovered, he found that his recollection of his 'lost' years differed -- sometimes radically -- from that of his family and friends. The night, for example, his best friend pulled a gun on him. 'No,' said the friend (to David's horror, as a lifelong pacifist), 'It was you that had the gun.' Using all his skills as an investigative reporter, he set out to research his own life, interviewing everyone from his parents and his ex-partners to the policemen who arrested him, the doctors who treated him and the lawyers who fought to prove he was fit to have custody of his kids. Unflinchingly honest and beautifully written, the result is both a shocking account of the depths of addiction and a fascinating examination of how -- and why -- our memories deceive us. As David says, we remember the stories we can live with, not the ones that happened.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary Karr, a stunning memoir of a mother-son relationship that is also the searing, unflinching account of a murder and its aftermath Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain’s death, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. “A real-life old West murder mystery,” the local TV announcers intone, while barroom gossips snicker cruelly. But for her twenty-year-old son, Justin St. Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after. Distancing himself from the legendary town of his childhood, Justin makes another life a world away in San Francisco and achieves all the surface successes that would have filled his mother with pride. Yet years later he’s still sleeping with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he is pulled back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, a onetime army paratrooper, the type of woman who would stand up to any man except the men she was in love with? What led her to move from place to place, man to man, job to job, until finally she found herself in a desperate and deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of desert with an unstable ex-cop? Justin’s journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt Earp, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of stepfathers who were a constant, sometimes threatening presence in his life, to a harsh world on the margins full of men and women all struggling to define what family means. He decides to confront people from his past and delve into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother’s life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be. Praise for Son of a Gun “[A] spectacular memoir . . . calls to mind two others of the past decade: J. R. Moehringer’s Tender Bar and Nick Flynn’s Another Bull____ Night in Suck City. All three are about boys becoming men in a broken world. . . . [What] might have been . . . in the hands of a lesser writer, the book’s main point . . . [is] amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation. . . . If the brilliance of Son of a Gun lies in its restraint, its importance lies in the generosity of the author’s insights.”—Alexandra Fuller, The New York Times Book Review “[A] gritty, enthralling new memoir . . . St. Germain has created a work of austere, luminous beauty. . . . In his understated, eloquent way, St. Germain makes you feel the heat, taste the dust, see those shimmering streets. By the end of the book, you know his mother, even though you never met her. And like the author, you will mourn her forever.”—NPR “If St. Germain had stopped at examining his mother’s psycho-social risk factors and how her murder affected him, this would still be a fine, moving memoir. But it’s his further probing—into the culture of guns, violence, and manhood that informed their lives in his hometown, Tombstone, Ariz.—that transforms the book, elevating the stakes from personal pain to larger, important questions of what ails our society.”—The Boston Globe “A visceral, compelling portrait of [St. Germain’s] mother and the violent culture that claimed her.”—Entertainment Weekly

Tom Healy was in trouble. His theatrical troupe needed to get to Alder Gulch, Montana, and the weather was turning. Andy Barker promised Tom he could get them there safely, but Tom was reluctant to trust him: he had the lives of three actresses to consider, and his personal feelings for Janice further heightened his concern. Then King Mabry showed up. Although Tom didn’t like the way he looked at Janice, he could see that Mabry made Barker uneasy. So Tom invited Mabry to join them. Tom was right to be worried, because Barker had a plan. He knew that the wagons carried something more than actors and scenery. He and his men were going to steal it any way they could. And that included murder.

Tyray Hobbs wants revenge. Weeks ago he was one of the most feared students in Bluford High. But then Darrell Mercer publicly humiliated him, and Tyray lost his reputation. To get it back, he must take down Darrell. But how? With a broken hand, a troubled family, and no friends in sight, Tyray's options are limited. And when the kids he once bullied start threatening him his world completely unravels. Desperate to settle the score and regain respect, Tyray see only ones solution to his problems-- a gun.

Shell Scott. He’s a guy with a pistol in his pocket and murder on his mind. The crime world’s public enemy number one, this Casanova is a sucker for a damsel in distress. When a pair of lovely legs saunters into his office, he can’t help but take the job, even when the case is a killer. Shell feels like a walking, talking target. He’s not an easy guy to mistake for someone else, with his gray eyes, broken nose and missing ear tip, but who would want to take a shot at such a stunning and attractive man? Something’s fishy in the state of Denmark when Shell finds he is dodging bullets and it seems like everyone is holding a smoking gun. This case just might land Shell a new, deluxe residence . . . in the morgue. Honored with the Life Achievement Award by the Private Eye Writers of America! Everybody Had a Gun is the 3rd book in the Shell Scott Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

I crawl away and shut myself in a room with my Beatle records, the music that would keep me from suicide and strong enough to care for our baby daughter. This was the aftermath of his tours of duty in Vietnam, bringing that war home to our front door, letting itself in uninvited, causing both of us to relive the demons of the violence he experienced over there. It is a story that many women of my era who were married to combat Vietnam vets seldom tell; and who certainly wouldn't commit to paper. It's not a book about The Beatles; but their music is the backdrop to my story, a passion, a love and a musical therapy at the time that absolutely kept me alive. It is the story of the terror a war can bring home and how it can continue with devastating consequences. At that time; when our soldiers returned home from Vietnam; there was no mental health support program for us or our families. They were simply dropped back into a society that despised them and the war they fought; forcing them to internalize the trauma and relive it every day in their minds, and in our homes. Too many committed suicide, too many took my husband's path of physical violence, until finally, during the Gulf Wars our government recognized the need for "debriefing" and PTSD therapy when soldiers returned home; but it is still a token gesture. My story highlights how bad it really was back then and how much more attention needs to be drawn towards the minimal mental health care that our returning veterans receive today.