Category Archives: ebboks

Dealing with The Shadow Broker

The Shadow Broker
Trace Conger
$12.95 paper
$4.99 ebook

So back in the middle of June or thereabouts, I received an email from Trace Conger. Mr. Conger had seen my post about the Shamus Awards. His novel The Shadow Broker had made the final ballot for best independently published novel, and would I be interested in reviewing it? I said I would, but I didn’t think I could get to it before sometime in August as I had a pretty full slate. He said that would be fine and sent me an electronic copy. (Many thanks, sir.)

In fairness, I can’t say whether The Shadow Broker is deserving of the award simply because I haven’t read any of the other independently published titles on the ballot. But I can say that it certainly deserves to be on the ballot and should be hard to beat. Continue reading →

The Vanishing Smile

The Vanishing Smile
Earl Emerson
ebook $3.99

I was in the mood for a private eye novel a couple of weeks ago. I’d picked up an old paperback copy of The Vanishing Smile somewhere during the last few months, so I thought I’d give it a try. I knew this wasn’t the first book in the series (The Rainy City), as I had a copy of that one along with a few of Emerson’s other books. But sometimes series really don’t hit their stride until two or three volumes in, so I decided to give The Vanishing Smile a try. Continue reading →

A Pair of Markham PI Novellas

Before he become known as a western writer, James Reasoner wrote mysteries. A number of these were novellas that featured a PI named Markham and were published in Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine in the early 1980s. Back in the summer, before Google started messing with me and I decided to launch my own site, James began publishing them as stand-alone ebooks. I read the first one, The Man in the Moon, and enjoyed it. It was a traditional PI yarn, and I’m always up for one of those.

Reasoner published two more. I bought them, and has been typical of this past year, they sat on my ereader until recently. I read those two yesterday, and enjoyed them. Here’s what I thought. Continue reading →