Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin (2003)

The much-loved author of the bestselling Raney and Walking Across Egypt is back with an endearing novel of calamity and comedy that celebrates the spirit and spunk of old age.

New York, NY: Scribner (2003)

This Irish bad-boy thriller -- set in the hardest streets of New York City -- brims with violence, greed, and sexual betrayal.

"I didn't want to go to America, I didn't want to work for Darkey White. I had my reasons. But I went."

So admits Michael Forsythe, an illegal immigrant escaping the Troubles in Belfast. But young Michael is strong and fearless and clever -- just the fellow to be tapped by Darkey, a crime boss, to join a gang of Irish thugs struggling against the rising Dominican powers in Harlem and the Bronx. The time is pre-Giuliani New York, when crack rules the city, squatters live furtively in ruined buildings, and hundreds are murdered each month. Michael and his lads tumble through the streets, shaking down victims, drinking hard, and fighting for turf, block by bloody block.

Dodgy and observant, not to mention handy with a pistol, Michael is soon anointed by Darkey as his rising star. Meanwhile Michael has very inadvisably seduced Darkey's girl, Bridget -- saucy, fickle, and irresistible. Michael worries that he's being followed, that his affair with Bridget will be revealed. He's right to be anxious; when Darkey discovers the affair, he plans a very hard fall for young Michael, a gambit devilish in its guile, murderous in its intent.

But Darkey fails to account for Michael's toughness and ingenuity or the possibility that he might wreak terrible vengeance upon those who would betray him.

A natural storyteller with a gift for dialogue, McKinty introduces to readers a stunning new noir voice, dark and stylish, mythic and violent -- complete with an Irish lilt.

San Francisco, CA: Macadam Cage Publishing (2003)

Cecil Durgin, a twelve-year-old African-American orphan, mutely witnesses the perverse buildup to a brutal murder at an exclusive hunting camp in 1958. Decades later, the shame and guilt still haunt him when fissures begin forming in the lives of several characters unwittingly connected by a young woman's body buried deep in the West Alabama woods. Thirty years of pressure and bitterness ignite an unstoppable chain reaction leading back to the night of the murder - and the truth.
In a Temple of Trees is the story of painful secrets and their aftermath on the powerful and the meek, husbands and wives, the living and the dead.

New York, NY: Amistad Press (2003)

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for "Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor -- William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation -- as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend estate, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave "speculators" sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years. An ambitious, luminously written novel that ranges seamlessly between the past and future and back again to the present, The Known World weaves together the lives of freed and enslaved blacks, whites, and Indians -- and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery.

Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin (2003)

"The Canal House takes the reader to far away and troubled places and tells the story of four people whose lives are forever changed by their experiences with violence, disaster, and even treachery. While there is plenty of action, the real story - the story of a photographer so divorced from his subjects and from life that he cannot be said to be fully alive - moves with telling subtlety toward a gripping denouement."

-Robert Bausch

New York, NY: Knopf (2003)

In his critically acclaimed new novel, Tim Gautreaux fashions a classic and unforgettable tale of two brothers struggling in a hostile world.
In a lumber camp in the Louisiana cypress forest, a world of mud and stifling heat where men labor under back-breaking conditions, the Aldridge brothers try to repair a broken bond. Randolph Aldridge is the mill’s manager, sent by his father—the mill owner—to reform both the damaged mill and his damaged older brother. Byron Aldridge is the mill's lawman, a shell-shocked World War I veteran given to stunned silences and sudden explosions of violence that make him a mystery to Randolph and a danger to himself. Deep in the swamp, in this place of water moccasins, whiskey, and wild card games, these brothers become embroiled in a lethal feud with a powerful gangster. In a tale full of raw emotion as supple as a saw blade, The Clearing is a mesmerizing journey into the trials that define men’s souls.

New York, NY: William Morrow (2003)

Based on incidents that occurred a few miles from the author's childhood home, this extraordinary first novel is set in 1897 Alabama at a time when residents formed a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish townspeople for the murder of an aspiring politician.

San Francisco, CA: MacAdam Cage (2003)

Jack Skinner is a criminal defense lawyer whose life is not what he imagined it would be. He's divorced, his children basically hate him, and for 25 years he has had to deal with a terrible allegation that has torn his family apart. Then one day he thinks his money problems are over when a stranger with a wad of cash hires him to procure a liquor license. Two days later his client is arrested for the murder of a wealthy South Alabama socialite. Jack believes that his client is innocent and sets out to prove it. This decision, however, puts his professional and personal life on a crash course.

New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin (2003)

Stone's fever dream of possession is a remarkable new psychological thriller of razor-sharp intensity: mysterious, erotic, and deeply readable. When a college professor pursues Lara Purcell to her native island of St. Trinity, he is caught unawares in a high-stakes smuggling scheme as his world becomes an ever-shifting phantasmagoria.

New York, NY: William Morrow (2003)

"Under The Skin" is a hot-blooded tale of love and crime set in 1936 Galveston, Texas. In his signature style (described as what would happen if Sam Peckinpah and Cormac McCarthy got together to write a novel), a mix of brutality and hauntingly beautiful prose, Blake brings us his eighth novel. Blake is a master at creating the heroic bad guy. His characters deal with the conflicts of personal identity with the struggles of men and women to know who they truly are. "Under The Skin" will be a great read for fans of James Cain novels. "Blake is writing books that move like a stampede of mustangs with prose that ripples like Hemmingway on steroids." - Rocky Mountain Press

New York, NY: Doubleday (2003)

The office of the public defender is not known as a training ground for bright young litigators. Clay Carter has been there too long and, like most of his colleagues, dreams of a better job in a real firm. When he reluctantly takes the case of a young man charged with a random street killing, he assumes it is just another of the many senseless murders that hit D.C. every week. As he digs into the background of his client, Clay stumbles on a conspiracy too horrible to believe. He suddenly finds himself in the middle of a complex case against one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, looking at the kind of enormous settlement that would totally change his life--that would make him, almost overnight, the legal profession's newest king of torts.

New York, NY: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday (2002)

So begins Pat Conroy's journey back to 1967 and his startling realization "that this season had been seminal and easily the most consequential of my life." The place is the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, that now famous military college, and in memory Conroy gathers around him his team to relive their few triumphs and humiliating defeats. In a narrative that moves seamlessly between the action of the season and flashbacks into his childhood, we see the author's love of basketball and how crucial the role of athlete is to all these young men who are struggling to find their own identity and their place in the world. In fast-paced exhilarating games, readers will laugh in delight and cry in disappointment. But as the story continues, we gradually see the self-professed "mediocre" athlete merge into the point guard whose spirit drives the team. He rallies them to play their best while closing off the shouts of "Don't shoot, Conroy" that come from the coach on the sidelines. For Coach Mel Thompson is to Conroy the undermining presence that his father had been thoughout his childhood. And in these pages finally, heart-breakingly, we learn the truth about the Great Santini. In "My Losing Season," Pat Conroy has written an American classic about young men and the bonds they form, about losing and the lessons it imparts, about finding one's voice and one's self in the midst of defeat. And in his trademark language, we see the young Conroy walk from his life as an athlete to become the writer the world knows him to be.