“On the third morning I awoke starving on the brittle edge of madness. I’d dreamed about sneering Nazis although I didn’t know any by sight. How do you dream of sneering faces you’ve never seen? Is this the well from which the writer’s craft springs? The Nazis, I have to say, were no joke and there were a lot of them and they were all young women. In what was surely an unbelievably lucky break for me the highest-ranking of them was a dead-ringer for a young Marthe Keller. I noted lacy black bras were a covert part of the Nazi juggernaut’s uniform ... Hitler was clearly no pal of anyone; he had a penis like a cocktail pickle and just one testicle I’ve heard. The most wicked facet of master race was that it brooked nothing more than a skimpy ration of a single nut per man and an apparently short-armed Heil.” – From Breaking Flowers

In Breaking Flowers, bestselling crime writer Lee Lamothe radically departs from his chronicles of the underworld and stretches into the comedic, hallucinatory, bizarre, and pornographic.

Flowers, a wildly successful writer of sex manuals, finds himself about to turn forty with nothing to show for it except a lot of money and four ex-wives. Once, he was a literary darling after writing a well-reviewed coming-of-age novel. But, unable to write a follow-up book, Flowers was shanghaied into the dirty book trade by Ben Balfour, a predatory agent with a fondness for strippers, turkey carcasses and disguises.

Now, with his birthday approaching, Flowers feels a rekindling of the feelings that long ago made him an elegant and honest writer. When he presents his plan to write another literary book to his agent, he’s inveigled into writing one last porno romp. With his detective father and palindrome-addled mother watching in horror, Flowers agrees.

Then, things really go to hell. His life-long refuge from the world, a local pub, is sold and his bar tab is cancelled. His loft is burglarized and the touchstones of his early writing life are stolen. He’s kidnapped and his agent vanishes. Besieged on all sides, Flowers wonders what he’s done to cause such a revolting turn of events.

And then he finds out.

Trade paperback edition available from McNally-Robinson:
http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com

Ebook to come from Kindle and Kobo in autumn 2015

In The Glass Pieces, the second novel in the Elodie Gray & Charlie Tate series, a woman returns home to find her husband, a successful and prominent businessman and philanthropist, dead by a self-inflicted gunshot. A note is left; it simply says, “I’m sorry.” Because of the prominence of the family involved, the homicide squad conducts a thorough investigation and determines it was a genuine suicide. But they never determine why Martin Barnett – a man who had it all – killed himself.

Elodie and Charlie are asked by the widow to find out what caused a man who had everything – vast wealth and power and a loving family and loyal friends – to commit suicide without explanation.

Using their unique skills – Elodie working through her high society contacts, and Charlie reaching out to his cop and criminal connections – they find themselves the target of a campaign to keep them from the truth.

And as they get closer to resolving the Barnett case, their personal relationship, already rocky and soaked in booze, comes perilously close to being destroyed.

And, they discover, sometimes secrets, like dead bodies, are better left buried.

The Charlie Tate & Elodie Gray series – short-listed for the Arthur Ellis Award – has been uniformly praised as “kick ass”, “tight and muscular”, and “genre-busting”.

Trade paperback edition available from McNally-Robinson:
http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com

E-book editions are available through Kindle and Kobo.