You'll Have A Great Day With Eight Very Bad Nights!

 

The holidays are approaching, and if you have the urge to sneak away from the family festivities and curl up with a good book, I have a suggestion…Eight Very Bad Nights: A Collection of Hanukkah Noir.

This collection of short stories centered around Hanukkah provides great entertainment and will appeal to everyone, regardless of your religion. After all, you don't have to be Jewish to appreciate a painful holiday spent with your boorish uncle or snoopy sister, wondering to yourself, "Aren't you dead yet?". There's something refreshing in seeing someone you despise get their just desserts (after a lavish dinner, of course). And after reading these stories, those homicidal urges should be satiated.

If they aren't, please resist the urge to use this collection as a HOW-TO guide to homicide (not that it doesn't contain a few good tips). Otherwise, you'll be spending the rest of your life in a prison cell, with plenty of time on your hands. Come to think of it, that's a lot of reading time, isn't it? But I digress.

Several great crime writers contributed to this collection edited by best-selling writer Tod Goldberg, many of whom I recognized, and a few who were new to me. You'll enjoy them all. There's even a story by Tod's brother, Lee Goldberg, a best-selling writer himself. Imagine having to edit your own brother's story submission...I wonder how that went over at the holiday dinner?

Brash Books - The new publishing kid on the block

There are a lot of good mystery and crime fiction novels that have fallen out of print over the past thirty years. Writers like Jack Lynch, W. L. Ripley, and Carolyn Weston (whose police procedurals were turned into the hit TV show The Streets Of San Francisco) were hard to find. You could wander the shelves of your local library hoping to get lucky or check out the second-hand bookstore in your town (assuming you have one).

No more. Brash Books, the creation of Lee Goldberg and Joel Goldman, is now publishing, as they put it, "the best crime novels in existence". That's a pretty bold claim. But I think they can back it up. Check out their author page, where you can find out more about their award winning writers. 

No more searching for that great book you heard about which is out of print. Brash Books is doing the legwork for you, pounding the streets and hunting down these lost but not forgotten writers. One author who was rediscovered and now is seeing his books back in print asked Joel how they managed to track him down. Brash Books did it with a private investigator! That's pretty brash..for a publisher.

Joel Goldman spoke to Sisters In Crime at our Border Chapter about Brash Books and how the company got it's start. It's a fascinating story...one of many. Check it out.