Going Blind Just For You

First, be sure to check out Michelle Styles' comments to Monday's post about the Harlequin Historical discontinuation rumors. The very good news is that we can stop panicking for now!

I have been buried here at work. I'm finally through my backlog of review journals, so I put myself to work clearing out publisher catalogs today. I adore these catalogs, but frankly they are low man on the totem pole when it comes to priorities. The problem with this is that when I finally get to them I start to go blind after a while. I still have 3 to go, but I have to quit now before my brain melts.

But I did find lots of goodies, and two particular titles of interest. OK, titles of interest to me and no, they are not romance. Not even close. Let's do the fiction first shall we?

The Blackest Bird by Joel Rose - slated for publication March 2007. Nothing like jumping the gun I always say.

Description: In the sweltering New York City summer of 1841, Mary Rogers, a popular counter girl at a tobacco shop in Manhattan, is found brutally ravaged in the shallows of the Hudson River. John Colt, scion of the firearm fortune, beats his publisher to death with a hatchet. And young Irish gang leader Tommy Coleman is accused of killing his daughter, his wife, and his wife’s former lover. Charged with solving it all is High Constable Jacob Hays, the city’s first detective. At the end of a long and distinguished career, Hays’s investigation will ultimately span a decade, involving gang wars, grave robbers, and clues hidden in poems by the hopeless romantic and minstrel of the night: Edgar Allan Poe.

And now the non-fiction:

Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties by Michael Lesy - slated for publication February 2007

Description: “Things began as they usually did: Someone shot someone else.” So begins a chapter of Michael Lesy’s disturbingly satisfying account of Chicago in the 1920s, the epicenter of murder in America. A city where daily newspapers fell over each other to cover the latest mayhem. A city where professionals and amateurs alike snuffed one another out, and often for the most banal of reasons, such as wanting a Packard twin-six. Men killing men, men killing women, women killing men—crimes of loot and love. Just as Lesy’s first book, Wisconsin Death Trip, subverted the accepted notion of the Gay Nineties, so Murder City gives us the dark side of the Jazz Age. Lesy’s sharp, fearless storytelling makes a compelling case that this collection of criminals may be the progenitors of our modern age.

Oh and in case you pay attention to publishers - these are both coming out from Norton.