3 New Noir Novels

The Carrion Birds (M)
by Urban Waite

"As in his debut noir thriller, Waite again centers on the conflicting dreams, lost hopes, and shallowness of drug smugglers. Laid-off oil workers and former pig farmers try anything for a buck just to get ahead. Ray Lamar ran drugs up into New Mexico for over ten years and was left a widower and the father of a handicapped son. Guilt-ridden and ashamed, Ray desperately seeks to cleanse and restore himself-to somehow regain the piece of himself he lost while working for the cartel. Before he can return to Coronado, NM, to be with his son, he wants to run one last job-gunning down his boss's rival and thereby enforcing the primacy of the cartel-just a couple wrongs to make things right. However, innocent people are killed. Overcome with guilt, sadness, despair, and isolation, Ray seeks a final act of revenge that might grant his redemption..." - Library Journal

The Last Whisper in the Dark : a novel (M)
by Tom Piccirilli

"*Starred Review* Few authors can write heroes as haunted, or prose as filled with the poetry of noir, as Piccirilli. Following The Last Kind Words, Terry Rand, reluctant thief in a family of thieves, struggles to resist being pulled into what he calls the underneath, but the baggage of the past weighs heavily. Chub, the best friend who married Terry's lost love, Kimmy, is running for his life after a bad mistake, and Terry swears to Kimmy that he'll keep Chub safe a promise he probably can't keep. Meanwhile, his mother's side of the family has surfaced, bringing plenty of problems with them. Piccirilli has produced another novel that ranks among his best yet. This is the opposite of a thriller where the hero races a ticking clock to solve a simple task: Terry battles personal history, bad decisions, family genetics, and a wrenching sense of mortality as he struggles (and often fails) to protect those he loves the most. Readers who love noirish atmosphere will be happily marinated in it. But it's Terry's fascinating family that is one of the biggest draws here. In a genre filled with loners, the sense of inescapable, twisted togetherness gives this an unparalleled depth of feeling." - Booklist

The Devil and the Detective (M)
by John Goldbach

"Private detective Robert James is more interested in chronicling his cases than solving them, receives a phone call in the middle of the night from Elaine Andrews, a young woman who has just found her much older husband dead on their living room couch, a knife protruding from his chest. Or at least that’s probably what happened . . . The Devil and the Detective is a noir novel about the biggest mystery of all – that of consciousness. It’s an unorthodox meditation on writing, love, violence and ideology – imagine The Big Sleep via Fernando Pessoa, with a side of Buster Keaton." -publisher