Showing results by narrator "Richard Poe" in All Categories

From the author of the John J. Malone Mysteries: An estranged relative becomes heir to a Chesapeake Bay fortune - and his family’s ghostly history. If it hadn’t been for his great-uncle Philip, David Telefair would’ve grown up unwanted, forlorn, and poverty stricken in a New England parsonage. But for 20 years, David’s generous benefactor paid for his education, yearly summer camps, living expenses as he grew older, and any amenities he ever needed.

“You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich”, writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.” Nonconformity is about 20th-century America: “Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder.” In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer’s relation to society....

Nelson Algren’s two travel writing books describe his journeys through the seamier sides of great American cities and the international social and political landscapes of the mid-1960s. Algren at Sea brings them together in one volume. Notes from a Sea Diary offers one of the most remarkable appraisals of Ernest Hemingway ever written. Who Lost an American? is a whirlwind spin through Paris and Playboy clubs, New York publishing and Dublin pubs, Crete, and Chicago.

The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren’s lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren’s beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren’s intensity but his diversity are revealed and celebrated.

In Entrapment and Other Writings - containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays - Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hasn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon, despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure.

Algren’s classic 1947 short story collection is the pure vein Algren would mine for all his subsequent novels and stories. The stories in this collection are literary triumphs that “don’t fade away.” Among the stories included here are “A Bottle of Milk for Mother”, about a Chicago youth being cornered for a murder, and “The Face on the Barrome Floor”, in which a legless man pummels another man nearly to death - the seeds that would grow into the novel Never Come Morning.

"The First Kill" is a bit of backstory for the universe of The Shadow Campaigns. The Shadow Throne implies a connection between Andreas, Duke Orlanko's brutally efficient go-to killer, and Sothe, the Gray Rose, his best agent turned bitter enemy. In this story, we get to see these two at an earlier point in their careers, and take a look at how that relationship got started.

Martin T. Manton was a corrupt federal appeals court judge in New York who was convicted in 1939 and sent to prison. At the time, this was a hugely important story: Manton was considered the highest-ranking judge in the United States after the nine Justices of the Supreme Court, and was nearly appointed to that august body in 1922. Yet his story has never been told in book-length form before, and never with the benefit of such exhaustive research.

The last thing a covert CIA operative wants is to become an overnight sensation. But once President Cahill exposed him on social media for killing an international drug cartel kingpin, this became Kelley’s new norm. Coming to Senator Frank Beemer’s aid after a diabolical shooting on the MAX, Portland’s metro-transit train, Garris is now on everyone’s radar.

Psychologist Alan Gregory is living through a season of discontent. With a new daughter, a wonderful wife, and a prospering career, he has little to complain about but lots of regrets: past cases that won't let him go, patients who don't get better, and a growing unease with keeping secrets. But Gregory has two new patients who will drag him out of his introspection and dare him to enter a storm of injustice and revenge.

Gibbs Storey is a woman no man can resist. When her comfortable life is shattered by the man she thought it was safe to give her heart to, the nightmare has only just begun. Psychologist Alan Gregory is used to dealing with nightmares. But a brutal, shocking confession locks him into darkness—and forces him to choose between saving himself and saving those who will otherwise end their days pleading for mercy at the hands of a vicious serial killer. What Alan can't see is that either choice might cost him his life.

When an emergency call brings Dr. Alan Gregory to an ICU, he finds 15-year-old Merritt Strait recovering from a suicide attempt. Her stepsister, Chaney, already lies near death—after her managed care provider turned down an experimental treatment that could save her life. When a wealthy executive with the family's HMO is shot to death, Alan discovers shocking evidence linking Merritt to his killing. As time runs out, he searches for answers—and discovers the truth about a family that will stop at nothing to save one of its own.

DA Kirsten Lord saw her husband gunned down before her eyes. Now Kirsten is living in fear, telling her secrets to psychologist Alan Gregory … and hiding deep in the Witness Protection Program, where every stranger is a threat, every phone call is a menace. Until she realizes … The Program is the deadliest place of all.

As the minutes tick down, Warning Signs explodes into a gripping story of crime and punishment, tragedy and retribution—and of human beings caught in the shattering cross fire of forces beyond their control…forces sometimes within themselves.