Hired to investigate financial irregularities at a pharmaceutical company, a routine job turns into something more threatening when Clarke discovers a body in the company’s research laboratory. As the financial investigation progresses, she searches for a connection to the murder. Someone is trying to bring the company down. But, amid escalating intimidation and threats of violence from animal rights protestors, she struggles to find the truth.
As Clarke finally uncovers the murderer’s identity, she realises how dangerous they really are. Time is running out. Can she save herself and her colleagues before it’s too late?
Meet Christine Pattle
Christine Pattle writes mystery-thrillers with interesting characters and plenty of action. Her aim is always to write a good page-turning story that readers will love. When she’s not writing, she’s busy scaring herself silly, riding big, feisty horses, or walking around the countryside dreaming up exciting new plots.
“A well-crafted gangland crime thriller with a fascinating military subplot and a deliciously mysterious villain.” –BestThrillers.com
When a covert operation during the Vietnam War ends in tragedy, one of its members resolves to kill the man who betrayed it to the enemy. Now, fifteen years later, he’ll finally get his chance.
Chicago, 1987. Home of mediocre baseball teams, gangs that rule the streets, and a Mexican drug cartel that supplies the city with heroin. Chicago Police Detective Marcelle DeSantis and her partner, Bernie Bernardelli, are working a series of heroin-related murders, and their job just got more complicated. The man who sabotaged the Vietnam operation, Robert Thornton, is now the chief enforcer for a Southeast Asian heroin cartel, and after fifteen years overseas he’s arrived in Chicago to eliminate the reigning cartel and seize control of the city’s heroin trade.
Racing to stop a drug war, Marcelle and Bernie don’t realize they’re about to be caught in a deadly crossfire: another man is circling in the wings, one of Thornton’s soldiers from Vietnam, who’s preparing to exact his long-sought revenge against his former mentor. He’s the last person anyone would ever suspect, and when he finally makes his move, the paths of these four people will explosively converge.
Meet David Rabin
David Rabin spends his time writing crime fiction, running a competitive shooting program, and competing in rifle sports. His debut novel, In Danger of Judgment, is a crime thriller set in 1987 Chicago, and was reviewed by IndieReader as “a stunning debut….an engrossing page-turner….an intricately-plotted crime thriller that’s cinematic and wildly compelling.” The book has been honored with multiple awards: 2022 Maxy Awards Runner-Up – Thriller 2022 Finalist, BestThrillers.com Book Awards – Military Thriller 2022 Best Book Awards Finalist – Thriller & Adventure 2022 Pencraft Book Awards Runner-Up – Thriller – General
A chance discovery of a fraud turns into a terrifying ordeal… As Clarke tries to unravel the web of lies, she will need to find enormous reserves of courage to escape from an impossible situation.
Meet Christine Pattle
Christine Pattle writes mystery-thrillers with interesting characters and plenty of action. Her aim is always to write a good page-turning story that readers will love. When she’s not writing, she’s busy scaring herself silly, riding big, feisty horses, or walking around the countryside dreaming up exciting new plots.
Does crime pay? Not quite in the way a burglar wanted in THE OTHER ROOM – it will deter you from life on the wrong side of the law. A Manhattan detective finds that being murdered is more than just bad luck in A BUSINESS OF CHANCE. Blackmail is an ugly crime, but someone turns things to their favour in HUSH MONEY. You can push a woman so far…and no further… in THE CHINA DOG.
Crime has many guises. From the authors of LITERARY ALLSHORTS come the above tales and 15 more short stories, of events which are by turn dangerous, atmospheric, occasionally humorous and even poetic…but always written with criminal intent.
The TEN GREEN JOTTERS consistently keep you hanging on for more…
C.G. Harris, Tony Ormerod, Richard Miller, A.J.R. Kinchington, Glynne Covell, Richie Stress, Janet Winson, Julia Gale, Jan Brown and Lilly.
Meet Ten Green Jotters
The Ten Green Jotters are a group of writers ranging from award winning authors to travellers to New Guinea, India, South Africa, Thailand. Their love of writing brought them together and following on from the success of their first anthology (Literary AllShorts) have plunged into the crime genre for this collection of eclectic criminal tales – All Shorts of Crime.
A serial killer thinks he overstepped his bounds on his last murder. He attempts to seek help on the serial killer website REDRUM. A psychiatrist who believes he can help psychotic killers through counseling sets up a group therapy meeting dubbed Psychos Anonymous. Six masked murderers attend the meeting but one of them is not there to be counseled.
Meet Cedrick E. Wilson
Cedrick was in love with writing before he even realized it. It started first with his love of film. With movies like Flash Gordon, Star Wars, Cooley High and The Warriors. Those films opened up his creativity. There were times when visiting his Grandmother or his great Aunts on their secluded farms in the state of Texas when his imagination was all he had.
As a teen, he moved to Florida and that’s where his creativity took off. In his first couple of days in a new school, he was approached by a classmate who asked did he know how to rap? He answered no, but the classmate replied by saying I’ll show you. Cedrick began to write raps which back in the eighties was more like stories and much different than it is today. He wrote the story and the classmate rearranged the words and organized them into rap lyrics and from there he just couldn’t put the pen down. After the classmate moved away, Cedrick kept on writing stories and turned them into rap lyrics even though he couldn’t rap to save his life.
After high school, he kept writing but a discovery in a magazine helped him go in a different direction. He came across an advertisement for writers, a store that sold books that taught you how to write screenplays. His love for movies and writing came together.
Life happened and he put away his pen to provide for his family but the stories swimming around in his head wouldn’t go away. Even though he was busy with work and taking care of his family, he made sure that he made time to write. He wrote a ton of scripts and entered a few screenwriting contests, but he realized to make it in Hollywood you’d more than likely would have to move there and would be a lot more difficult to get in the door. His wife kept telling him for years to write books instead but he didn’t think he was cut out to be an author in that capacity.
A life altering event plus the fact that he’s not getting any younger finally caused him to take the plunge.
He published his first book in January 2018 with more to come.
In 1867, Eden Fitzgerald marries, not for love or money, but to persuade her influential in-laws to obtain her father’s release from a contrived prison sentence. Cleverly evading those who believe she, like her father, is a smuggler and Fenian collaborator, Eden does what she can, what she must to achieve her goal. When legal methods are exhausted, she dons a mask, carries a pistol and, using her wiles, wits, even her seductive beauty, robs wealthy citizens to amass enough money to arrange her father’s escape.
Her life grows ever more complicated by the lustful attentions of several men who profess to love her, and the one man she loves but dares not trust. As her crimes worsen, culminating in what may be treason, and her enemies grow more dangerous and determined to apprehend her, she must run for her own freedom.
Meet Cat Dubie
Cat was born in Austria, immigrated to Canada when she was four, grew up on the prairies, and now lives with her family in the beautiful province of British Columbia.
She has written creatively since she could hold a pencil. Poems, short stories, novels, reviews, essays. Her day job as a technical writer for various levels of government was the labor she did for a living so that in her free time she could indulge in her labor of love, writing romantic fiction.
PRANKS. OIL. PROTEST. JOKES BETWEEN NEWLYWEDS. AND ONE HILARIOUS SIEGE OF A MAJOR CORPORATION.
Remmy grows up with Beth in Bellhammer, Illinois as oil and coal companies rob the land of everything that made it paradise. Under his Grandad, he learns how to properly prank his neighbors, friends, and foes. Beth tries to fix Remmy by taking him to church. Under his Daddy, Remmy starts the Bell Hammer Construction Company, which depends on contracts from Texarco Oil. And Beth argues with him about how to build a better business. Together, Remmy and Beth start to build a great neighborhood of “merry men” carpenters: a paradise of s’mores, porch furniture, newborn babies, and summer trips to Branson where their boys pop the tops of off the neighborhood’s two hundred soda bottles. Their witty banter builds a kind of castle among a growing nostalgia.
Then one of Jim Johnstone’s faulty Texarco oil derricks falls down on their house and poisons their neighborhood’s well.
Poisoned wells escalate to torched dog houses. Torched dog houses escalate to stolen carpentry tools and cancelled contracts. Cancelled contracts escalate to eminent domain. Sick of the attacks from Texaco Oil on his neighborhood, Remmy assembles his merry men:
“We need the world’s greatest prank. One grand glorious jest that’ll bloody the nose of that tyrant. Besides, pranks and jokes don’t got no consequences, right?”
:: PRAISE FOR LANCELOT SCHAUBERT AND BELL HAMMERS ::
“Schaubert recounts a mischievous man’s eight decades in Illinois’s Little Egypt region in his picaresque debut. Remmy’s life of constant schemes and pranks and a lifelong feud with classmate Jim Johnstone and the local oil drilling company proves consequential. This is a hoot.”
— Publisher’s Weekly
“BELL HAMMERS is written in a style not unworthy of John Kennedy Toole and William Faulkner – the vivid characterization of Southern ethnography commingled with stark, episodic spectacle breathes with the spirit of quintessential Americana. It is a text I would happily assign in an American Novel class and would expect it to yield satisfying discourse alongside works in the canon, whether beside the sardonic prose of Mark Twain or the energetically painful narratives of Toni Morrison.”
— Dr. Anthony Cirilla
“Schaubert’s words have an immediacy, a potency, an intimacy that grab the reader by the collar and say, ‘Listen, this is important!’ Probing the bones and gristle of humanity, Lancelot’s subjects challenge, but also offer insights into redemption if only we will stop and pay attention.”
— Erika Robuck, national bestselling author of Hemingway’s Girl
“Myth, regret, the lore of our heritage and the subtle displays of our castes — no one so accurately and imaginatively captures the joys and sorrows of life in the Midwest as Schaubert does here. BELL HAMMERS is a Tree Grows in Brooklyn as told by Gabriel Garcia Marquez if Marquez lived in rural Illinois and only told stories to his grandkids. Seriously a delight to read.”
— Colby Williams, author of the Axiom Gold Medal winning book Small Town, Big Money
“Loved BELL HAMMERS because Lancelot wrote about people who don’t get written about enough and he did it with humor, compassion, and heart.”
— Brian Slatterly, author of Lost Everything and editor of The New Haven Review
“I’m such a fan of Lancelot Schaubert’s work. His unique view and his life-wisdom enriches all he does. We’re lucky to count him among our contributors.”
— Therese Walsh, author of The Moon Sisters and Editorial Director of Writer Unboxed
Meet Lancelot Schaubert
Two excerpts of Lancelot Schaubert’s (lanceschaubert.org) debut novel BELL HAMMERS sold to The New Haven Review ( Yale’s Institute Library ) and The Misty Review, while a third excerpt was selected as a finalist for the last Glimmer Train Fiction Open in history. He has also sold poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to TOR (MacMillan), The Anglican Theological Review, McSweeney’s, Poker Pro’s World Series Edition, The Poet’s Market, Writer’s Digest, and many similar markets.
Spark + Echo chose him for their 2019 artist in residency, commissioning him to write four short stories.
He has published work in anthologies like Author in Progress, Harry Potter for Nerds, and Of Gods and Globes — the last of which he edited and featured stories by Juliet Marillier (whose story was nominated for an Aurealis award), Anne Greenwood Brown, Dr. Anthony Cirilla, LJ Cohen, FC Shultz, and Emily Munro. His work Cold Brewed reinvented the photonovel for the digital age and caught the attention of the Missouri Tourism Board who commissioned him to write and direct a second photonovel, The Joplin Undercurrent, in partnership with award-winning photographer, Mark Neuenschwander.
He remains a committed husband to the grooviest girl on earth and is a public advocate for more free range trees. You know, Ents.
Brooklyn Petitjean is young, hot, rich, and hunted in post-pandemic Los Angeles, 2023, a city that’s cracking with tension, tent cities, roving Neo-Nazis, and a nasty gang of unemployed salesgirls. In this helter-skelter landscape, Brooklyn clashes with her fading movie star mother, finds love with a celibate ex-child star, and glimpses a terrifying future through a young psychic who tells her, “Something’s chasing you and it’s not done with you yet.”
Reader’s Favorite Book Reviews ***** “What an excellent read for psychological thriller fans who are also curious about what goes on behind the beautiful faces and places, the glitz, gloom, and glamour of Hollywood… Readers follow Brooklyn’s thoughts and movements with increasing tension, and when she comes face to face with the real monsters of her childhood, she can barely breathe, and neither can we!… The complex plot is thoroughly engaging and full of twists.”
IndieReader— “Gewirtz writes with an enjoyable poison-pen tone… “…an engrossing story with a dizzying array of complicated plot lines, many of which speak to timely topics like ageism, cancel culture, and even… the Coronavirus pandemic. It’s a thrilling, engaging read that will keep readers in suspense until the last page.”
Foreword/Clarion Reviews— “Fascinating descriptions of the machinations of the movie industry also come through… Ending on a note of grace, Don’t Kill Me Because I’m Beautiful is a dark thriller in which Hollywood’s beauty belies its true evil.”
Online Book Club — “Don’t Kill Me Because I’m Beautiful is an intriguing story with an array of complicated plots and twists in a storyline that examines human behavior.”
“The book is a page-turner, full of terrors and compassion, with the sense that some of the events happened or came damned near close to happening.” —Amazon Customer
“Every plot twist (and there are many) had me guessing — and then surprised. Perfect, escapist entertainment…” — Amazon Customer
“An array of fascinating, funny, and freaky characters. I highly recommend.” — Amazon Customer
Meet H. Gewirtz
H. Gewirtz is a twice Emmy-nominated and three-time Writer’s Guild of America Award nominee for such television shows as The Simpsons, The Larry Sanders Show, Everybody Hates Chris, and many more. DON’T KILL ME BECAUSE I’M BEAUTIFUL is his debut novel and he says it’s the best and most satisfying writing he’s ever done. H. Gewirtz lives in Los Angeles with his artist wife, Karen. His son Connor, a RISD graduate created the cover art for the novel.
A cocky police detective, Dallas Scott and his best friend and partner, Ray Davis chase after a notorious hit-man, McNeil, and a bad decision by Scott lead to Davis’ death. Scott is haunted by his choice and it leads him to become a bad cop and a horrible husband. Now partnered with a new young detective, John Crawford, they finally get a lead on the killer only to come up short. Days later, they find McNeil dead on the street and this still leaves Scott unhappy because he didn’t kill the man responsible for his partner’s death himself. McNeil’s wife asks Scott for help but he refuses and this is a huge mistake which leads to her and her child’s death. This incident brings McNeil’s ghost to come back and haunt Scott and causes him to have a car accident. Now in the afterlife, the chase is on again with Scott having to go after McNeil for bringing chaos to the people who murdered him and his family. The Stakes are higher than ever in purgatory with Scott having to stop McNeil and having to prevent his soul from getting in the hands of the devil due to his own sins.
Meet Cedrick E. Wilson
Cedrick Wilson is an author of We Don’t Die and Psychos Anonymous.
A serial killer. A troubled young woman. An unlikely suspect.
Minneapolis TV research assistant, Gina Adams, devotes her life to recognizing patterns and anomalies and providing feedback on that. When she spots a woman clad in vintage garb that’s out of the ordinary for a Minnesota winter, her curiosity is piqued. What she soon discovers, however, upends the experienced researcher’s life.
Detectives Vilnas and Renford pride themselves on their investigative skills. That’s why they’re the perfect candidates for an FBI task force assigned to root out and apprehend an elusive serial killer who has gone to great lengths to cover their tracks.
When the detectives stop by headquarters for an impromptu holiday visit, a simple favor for a colleague opens a Pandora’s box of strange coincidences and their connection to a troubled young woman and her psychiatrist—the psychiatrist who also is a member of the task force.
As seemingly unconnected events come to light, the detectives’ investigation leads them in a new direction, where they’ll need more than analytical skills to solve the case and bring the vicious serial killer to justice.
