Posts Tagged: crime fiction

You’ve no doubt heard the terms crime fiction, mysteries and thrillers – but is there really a difference? The way books are categorized is influenced by a wide range of factors, from an author’s reputation to marketing goals to the space on a store’s shelves. However, there are definable differences between crime fiction, mysteries and thrillers – and understanding them can help you find exactly what you want to read. Crime fiction is the blanket term used to describe books that deal with any aspect of crime – including those who commit and solve it. If a book deals with detectives, police officers, lawyers, and of course, criminals, as a general rule, it’s a crime fiction... more

Read More of Thrillers vs Mysteries: What’s The Difference?

Jared Shurin reviews books for one of our favorite websites, Pornokitsch. Today he shares his admiration for the Bragg series of novels by Jack Lynch. There's no feeling in the world better than discovering a new series. Not just a good book, but a vast array of them. And, in this case, the series is Jack Lynch's Peter Bragg- a San Francisco private investigator who combines angst and wit in the perfect proportion. If that sounds familiar - perhaps like my beloved Travis McGee (John D. MacDonald) - it is, and part of the appeal of the Bragg series is that he is a West Coast McGee - a scarred-but-tender, manly-but-sensitive paladin of the dispossessed. The series is... more

Read More of The Bragg Novels: Paladin of the Dispossessed

Don't Explain by author Dallas Murphy

Artie Deemer is the reluctant sleuth who narrates my three-book series -- Lover Man, Lush Life, Don’t Explain -- published by Brash Books.  He would be happy sitting around his Manhattan apartment listening to jazz and maybe smoking a little pot. He’s able to do so because his dog Jellyroll makes a fortune in dog-food commercials and bad mystery movies featuring “the cutest dog in the world” (nobody cares about the humans).  But when, in Lover Man, his ex-girlfriend, Billie Burke, is found murdered in her bathtub, he gets up, turns off the music, and goes out to track down her killer.  In fact, he becomes obsessed with the search, fully aware of the danger to himself and his... more

Read More of Writing Artie Deemer: Dallas Murphy on “Lover Man,” “Lush Life” and “Don’t Explain”

The Juan Doe Murders by author Noreen Ayres

The Juan Doe Murders could have spun right off today’s headlines. Back in the ‘90s when I was living in Southern California, I was touched by the fate of Hispanics who arrived without, shall we say, government permission. Driving south just twenty miles from my home, I’d see highway signs with the black silhouettes of a running man and a woman just behind him grasping the hand of young child whose pigtails are flying as she seems lifted nearly off the ground; above them, the word “Caution.” The signs were to notify drivers that illegal aliens were told by their “coyotes” to jump out of vehicles near the immigration checkpoint and run across the freeway to hide in the shrubs... more

Read More of Writing the JUAN DOE MURDERS: What’s Old is New, What’s New is Old

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

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

Jared Shurin reviews books for one of our favorite websites, Pornokitsch. Today he shares his admiration for Stan Lee's darkly funny espionage thriller Dunn's Conundrum. First, to clear away any misconceptions, this is not the Stan Lee that appears in all those awful Marvel movies, this is a completely different Stan Lee - an advertising man, in fact, who wrote a couple political thrillers in his spare time. In fact, if you had to compare this Stan Lee to someone in the comics industry, the best choice would be Warren Fucking Ellis, as Dunn's Conundrum is a tangled, blackly comedic thriller about espionage and the dangers of information. Certainly there's great power AND... more

Read More of Dunn’s Conundrum: A Real Find