Posts Categorized: Reviews

BLACKBALL is Back!

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Here's Robert Randisi's full, 1987 review of Jimmy Sangster's hardboiled classic BLACKBALL, which Brash Books has just re-released in new ebook & trade paperback editions. Randisi is the founder of the Private Eye Writers of America.   Jimmy Sangster first made a name for himself in film and television. He wrote horror films for Hammer in England and then did a lot of episodic television in the United States, including scripts for S.W.A.T., Ironside, The Six Million Dollar Man, McCloud and Wonder Woman. His first novel, Private I (aka The Spy Killer), was published in 1967, and both it and its sequel, Foreign Exchange, were produced for TV with Robert Horton in the role of... more

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Ripley Reads: Thrilling Books for Your Summer

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Brash Books Author W.L. Ripley (Storme Warning, Hail Storme, etc) shares the thrilling books he's been reading lately...and that you might want to add to your summer reading list. Crush  (Phoef Sutton) – Phoef is an Emmy award winning writer for such luminaries as “Cheers,” “Newhart” and “Boston Legal.” His protagonist Caleb Rush (AKA: Crush) is a titanic hero who can do anything and everything and does it with panache and rollicking humor in a story that takes the reader on a wild carnival ride through the mean streets of the L.A. underworld. There is tension, black humor, pathos, quirky dialogue along with the humorous on every page. Sutton hits every note as Crush never... more

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Criss Cross: A Wild & Entertaining Romp

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Novelist James L. Thane, author of the crime novels No Place to Die and Until Death, shares his fondness for Tom Kakonis' thriller Criss Cross. In Cross Cross, his second crime novel, Tom Kakonis brings together a disparate cast of odd, strange and curious characters who come together very uneasily in the hope of making one big score. Principal among them is Mitchell Morse, a former college football player and ex-cop who's spiraled downhill to the point where he's now employed as a security guard at a Fleets superstore in Grand Rapids, Michigan, chasing down shoplifters. Before being fired from his last job, Mitch had met a fellow security guard named Jean Satterfield. Mitch has not... more

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Brash Words: Lots of Positive Buzz Leading Up to Our Sept 2 Launch

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Treasure Coast by author Tom Kakonis

We're only a few days from our Sept. 2nd launch and already we're getting a lot of positive buzz. We were thrilled by an interview with our co-founders, Lee Goldberg & Joel Goldman, in Kirkus Reviews. Here's an excerpt: The Brash editions I’ve seen so far are handsome, trade-size paperbacks, with bold cover imagery and elegant interior design. “Joel and I decided right off that we were either going to do this ‘first-class’ or not at all,” says Goldberg, “with high-quality covers that vividly and definitively establish a franchise for each author or series that we are publishing. We also decided that our covers would be contemporary, regardless of when the stories take... more

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Tom Kakonis: The Best Hardboiled Writer Working Today

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Criss Cross by author Tom Kakonis

Don Herron is a crime fiction reviewer and an acknowledged expert on the hardboiled greats Dashiell Hammett and Charles Willeford, two authors that are hard to match, much less top. But now he says there's a writer on the scene who is in the same league... Okay, so you’ve read Hammett and you’ve read Raymond Chandler, and you still want more great hardboiled writing. I’m not going to give a personal recommendation to a lot more, but then I’m tough. I think the novels The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity by James M. Cain and Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson are great. You won’t go wrong reading the crime novels of the black ex-patriat writer Chester... more

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