Ed Gorman's Blog, page 56

Visual Pulp: The Ace Double Titles of Jack Bickham

Ed here: I want to add my own words about Jack Bickham. He was a fine writer who might have hit the big big time but for the oversight of an agent. He was a solid pro who managed to write several books that deserve to be remembered. He was also one of the nicest people I've ever known. Ben Boulden of Gravetapping  does a fine job with Jack's earliest work. The Brad Smith novels were written and published late in Mr Bickham’s career. A career that began in the pulp paperback era. It started with one the pulpiest producers of all: Ace Books. He wrote seven novels for Ace between 1958 and 1961; each as one-half of a double. Six Westerns and a lonesome mystery. The covers are lurid, and the writing is brief and stark. These titles are different than his later work, but also the same. They are certainly shorter (mostly running about 125 pages in mass market), and absolutely by the hand of a writer still learning his craft, but, much like his later work, each is strong on sensible plotting, reliable cause and effect action, and entertaining and likable characters. 

Below is a list of Mr Bickham’s work published by Ace. The pertinent information is all there: title,year published, Ace serial number, and the companion book. And, more importantly, a nice fresh, newly minted, scan of the cover—front and back—of each book. 
Gunman’s Gamble . Ace D-308. Published in 1958 with Draw and Die! By Roy Manning. The first sentence:

“The sky had already begun to streak with pink and purple of nightfall when he rode to town, but the townsfolk came alive when they saw him.” 

Feud Fury . Ace D-384. Published in 1959 with Mountain Ambush by Louis Trimble. The first sentence:

“‘Trouble’ Clayton Hartung muttered.”

Killer’s Paradise . Ace D-442. Published in 1960 withRider of the Rincon by Rod Patterson. The first sentence:

“The eleven men stopped their steaming horses at the crest of the treeless hilltop and paused for just a moment, still in the driving, cruel July Kansas rain.”

The Useless Gun . Ace D-462. Published in 1960 with The Long Fuse by John A. Latham. Read the Gravetapping review. The first sentence:

“Four killers, honed to perfection in a series of raids and county seat wars, rode west out of Dallas County, Texas.”

Dally with a Deadly Doll . Ace D-489. Published in 1961 withSomebody’s Walking Over My Grave by Robert Arthur. The first sentence:

“‘Celery’ said Larry Crystal”

Hangman’s Territory . Ace D-510. Published in 1961 withThe Searching Rider by Harry Whittington. The first sentence:

“The late spring storm was breaking.”

Gunmen Can’t Hide . Ace F-120. Published with Come in Shooting by John Callahan. The first sentence:

“The winter of 1880 had been cruel in Colorado.” 

This post originally went live January 17, 2010 in a very different form. The text was adjusted (hopefully for the better) and the book images were changed out for the bigger and better versions. I hope you enjoy.You are subscribed to email updates from Gravetapping
To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.Email delivery powered by GoogleGoogle Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States

How Pulp Fiction Saved Literature

Ed here: This is probably my favorite lurid pb cover. Others might offer more grace and style but this one has it all. Night, a desperate babe, a gun, a swamp, an iconic killer car. Wow. 
I really like the following piece. A few weeks ago The New Yorker ran what I thought was a snooty and snotty piece about paperbacks. Though it was packed with information I really enjoyed the tone, when it came to bestselling pbs, was condescending at best. Was Mickey Spillane the source of all social evil in the 1950s? The article did everything except lynch him. 


How Pulp Fiction Saved Literature
by Wendy Smith from The Daily Beast
for the entire piece go here:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...

The covers were often trashy, the contents were often high art, but the low cost of the ubiquitous paperback created millions of new readers in America.Paula Rabinowitz’s American Pulp , her analysis of the impact of cheap paperback books on American culture is so enthusiastic and informative that her occasional lapses into impenetrable academese can be forgiven. Readers scratching their heads over such phrases as “this period, modernity, emphatically ushers in privacy itself” are advised to turn immediately for relief to the marvelous color plates of early paperback covers in all their tawdry glory.One of the many pleasures in American Pulp (subtitled How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street) is Rabinowitz’s knowledgeable survey of how those covers changed as a title “moved up or down the paperback hierarchy, [for example] from the relatively upscale NAL [New American Library] to the much less savory Berkley Books.” She’s also great on the lurid imagery’s coded messages, such as the slip strap falling off a shoulder that signaled post-World War II anxiety about unbridled female sexuality.Transgressive women weren’t just pulp cover girls, Rabinowitz demonstrates. They were authors and readers, as were African-Americans, gays, and lesbians, all given voice and acknowledged as consumers by the paperback industry. Distributed to newsstands and drugstores, pulp books were accessible to a broad spectrum of society, including members of America’s newly prosperous working class. Paperback publishers were willing to sign up anyone whose writings would sell, and they were also willing to help sales along with suggestive art and tantalizing cover lines like the one that proclaimed George Orwell’s anticolonial novel, Burmese Days, “A Saga of Jungle Hate and Lust.”For a vivid decade or so, sleaze was, somewhat paradoxically, a force for literacy and empowerment.Pulp paperbacks routinely blurred the boundaries between high art and low entertainment, serious nonfiction and salacious stimulation. One of the first books published in America about the Holocaust, a memoir titled Five Chimneys in hardcover, in 1947 was sensationally retitled I Survived Hitler’s Ovens for paperback, sporting the cover blurb, “The Uncensored Truth.” Cold War fears could be manipulated through misleading art to attract readers to daunting material. Fronted by an illustration depicting a white couple walking down a deserted road, the 1954 Bantam edition of Hiroshima packaged John Hersey’s sobering account of the devastation wreaked by a U.S. atom bomb as, in Rabinowitz’s sardonic assessment, “a garish nightmare of American annihilation—presumably, given the title, by the Japanese. 
Pulps also blurred stylistic distinctions. Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices appropriated the tabloid newspaper format to relate the history of African-Americans. Jorge Luis Borges’s first story in English translation appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, sold on the same mass-market racks as novels like Ann Petry’s The Country Place and Vera Caspary’s Laura, which slipped modernist techniques—interior monologues, multiple narrators with conflicting points of view, stories told through (fictional) documents—into murder mysteries and tales of small-town scandals.

News from Andrew Coburn and Stark House

Dear family, friends, fellow villagers,

This Sunday at BARNES &NOBLE, Salem NH, from 1-3 my dad, Andrew Coburn, will be signing copies of "Spouses & Other Crimes."
I would so love to have folks there as an honoring of not only this book, or his others, but of him.

It's likely my Dad will likely not publish again. It's rather a miracle that this book, the collection of some 11 of his over 30 published short stories, materialized.  It was not due to his agent or previous publishers, but from a publishing company who sought him out--and in this day and age, that's unheard of.

As most of you know, my dad was struck with cancer a few years back. It's truly the miracle of modern medicine that he beat it as sarcomas are aggressive and all too often deadly. But he did beat it. And though the cost was his work--the work that pumped life into him no less than his love for his wife and children--he is alive. And this time we have with him all the more precious.

But given his work was so much his life, reminding him that though he may never sit at his desk and write again, that he is, will always be, a writer, is what this signing is all about to me. Publishing his short stories, seeing the book in his hands; seeing people come to a bookstore for his book, coming to see him because of that work, is as powerful and as necessary as any of the life-saving surgeries or medicine he's had.

If you can be there, we'd so love to see you.  And if not, maybe pick up the book--it's getting great reviews!

Sincerely and with great thanks,
Cathy --her father's daughter.
Cheers,

Rick Ollerman
Associate Editor,
Stark House Press
[image error]
[image error]

From Libby Hellmann Fischer

Hi Ed,
Happy New Year to longtime friends and new arrivals!Ever have a "pie in the sky" dream come true? ​​
 I'm happy to share that one of my long-time dreams is coming true. Ever since I was in high school, listening to Motown and then the Beatles, I’ve had a hankering to be a radio DJ. I worked at the college radio station at Penn, and my first paid job was as a copy girl at KYW All News Radio in Philadelphia. Then, when I lived in New York, I was won over by Allison Steele, the “Nightbird” at WNEW-FM (Unfortunately she is no longer with us).
Turns out that hankering is now going to be a reality! I’m going to host a monthly internet radio show called “ Second Sunday Crime!”  The first show debuts this Sunday, January 11th on the "Authors on the Air" network. My guest will be William Kent Krueger. Kent is an award winning author many times over, especially this year. I hope you'll join us on this live program at 6 pm CST right here.
You can call in as well by dialing (347) 884-8266. So bring your questions! Read More I













Havana Lost Chosen as a Notable Page-Turner​
Havana Lost Chosen as a Notable Page-Turner​
I'm delighted to share that my novel Havana Lost was selected as a "Notable Page-Turner" by Shelf Unbound magazine. (See page 59 here.)
Cuba is very much in the news these days, so if you're looking for a novel or gift that depicts life on the island during the Revolution and Cuba’s Special Period in the ‘90s, you can find it here.  Read More Read More
Who doesn't love free books?​ A member of my Street Team suggested this Facebook page as a way to be "in the know" for low-cost/no-cost Kindle books. If you're interested, here's the link.  Thanks for buying my books and getting theirs for free. ;-). Read MoreWish I could tell you more about this... but I can't!​ Wish I could tell you more about this... but I can't!​
Sorry to tease, but something cool is in the works. I can't tell you about it yet, but I will as soon as I can. Hint: Norman Rockwell. Oops...
I can tell you that I'm working on my next Ellie book.  It will be my 5th Ellie novel after a hiatus of almost 10 years, and it feels great—like reconnecting with an old friend. Although I’ll deny I’m anythinglike Ellie. Really.
That's all for now... Please stay in touch on all my social channels, but especially Facebook.Read More



Warmly,
LibbyPlease add my email address to your safe sender list so my emails don't get trapped in the netherworld of your spam box.Latest Articles from my blog


My Latest Novel - Nobody's Child

New Novel Nature of The Bones by Matthew Paust

[image error]





Matthew Paust:

Nature of the Bones is my first venture away from satire. My first two novels—Executive Pink and Sacrifice--didn't make much of an impression. The reasons are myriad, I've no doubt, the main one being my inexperience—both in the craft of writing and in marketing. I self-pubbed them, and even though the copy was pretty clean, the indie label was even more of a stigma back then. So I retooled, came up with some characters—don't worry, Ed, my young lawyer, Joe “Blow” Stone, is no Sam McCain ripoff—and a plot that began hatching during the years I lived on part of an old plantation that had the rumored reputation of being a “correctional site” for slaves in need of attitude adjustments. I'd sit on the deck at night and look out at the woods, wondering where the ones whose attitudes never got adequately adjusted might be buried.
I'm publishing Bones as a Kindle exclusive to see if my more serious narrative voice will fare better in the marketplace. I've planned a series for the Blow character, with each story involving loosely related mysteries both historical and current. The second, First Shot, links the mystery of who fired first in the Battle of Lexington with the modern murder of a Revolutionary War reenactor. That's finished in first draft, and the third, harkening back to the mystery of where Nathaniel Bacon is buried, is at this moment marinating somewhere in my addled cerebrum.
http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Bones-Mathew-Paust-ebook/dp/B00RWB5BGI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1420671614&sr=1-1&keywords=paust+bones


   [image error]

Between Midnight and Dawn R. Emmett Sweeney Movie Morlocks

Between Midnight and DawnEd here: The excellent R. Emmett Sweeney has a go at a movie I saw when I was ten or eleven and it was really a downer for me. This is from TCM MOVIE MORLOCKS. Because I'm a computer moron I can' show you the poster. BTW the "Diskant"who photographed it was the father of John D. MacDonald's last agent.

NIGHT AND THE CITY: BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND DAWN (1950)Posted by R. Emmet Sweeney on January 6, 2015Between00020
 “A brutal policeman is a terrible thing. He has too much power. Too many chances of taking his viciousness out on helpless people.” – Katherine Mallory (Gale Storm) in Between Midnight and Dawn
In the grim police procedural Between Midnight and Dawn, violence is a spigot that cannot be turned off. It begins with a thrill – a tense night time shootout in an auto-body shop with some generic young hoods. But for beat cop prowl car partners Rocky Barnes (Mark Stevens) and Daniel Purvis (Edmond O’Brien), it’s just one of their nightly spasms of gunfire. Rocky is able to retain his humanity, working off his nerves through a constant patter of jokes, but Purvis has worn out his concern for human life. Once it turns dark, all women are tramps, all men are thugs, and Purvis’ misanthropic disgust flows into his trigger finger. The movie strays into unconvincing romance — the brightness looking sallow and jaundiced against the sepulchral evening blacks of DP George Diskant (much shot on location in Los Angeles city streets) — but it retains a bitter aftertaste upon its close. Between Midnight and Dawn is available on the TCM Vault Collection’s “Columbia Film Noir 
It was director Gordon Douglas’ second harsh noir of 1950 — he made it immediately following Kiss Me Tomorrow, featuring James Cagney as an abusive, single-minded psychopath. The shadow of Cagney’s character appears in Purvis, peeking out from behind his sober on-duty face whenever he sees any adult carousing after dark. Then he spits out the insults and batters witnesses. He is, according to the film’s rights, and that of the world around him, a “good” cop. He and Barnes are ex-marines and best pals who room together and work together, and their relationship feels like a series of routines worked out over the decades. Purvis is the ungainly sober straight man who reacts to the jackrabbit energy of Barnes and his constant stream of humor. Barnes is always acting, which insulates him from the world outside, while Purvis is an open nerve, instantly pained by everything around him.
Between_Midnight_and_Dawn_poster
The film was made for Columbia Pictures, and shot from February – March of 1950. It has the looks of a cheap production, using a few office sets and the rest shot on location in Los Angeles. Mark Stevens was positioned as a star for 20th Century Fox for a few years in the late ’40s (The Dark Corner, The Snake Pit), but he was released from his contract in 1950. Between Midnight and Dawn was his second film as a free agent, after he made the romantic comedy Please Believe Me for MGM. It is striking to compare his relative youthfulness in Between Midnight to the films he would write and direct a few years later (Cry Vengeance (’54) and Timetable (56)). In those latter, despairing noirs Stevens looks emaciated and burnt-out, the movies a monument to his disillusionment with the industry. In Between Midnight and Dawn he still has pep and vigor, and earned top billing over Edmond O’Brien.  The screenplay by Eugene Ling (adapted from a story by Leo Katcher and Gerald Drayson Adams) nails together a hodgepodge of genres, though it would be called noir today. It is framed as a procedural, opening with a voice of God about the little guys who arrive on the scene before the more famous FBI attention hoggers show up – the radio patrolmen (the original title was Prowl Car). Barnes and Purvis then nab the young hoodlums in the auto-body shop after a low-light gunfight. There are other slices-of-life attempts at realism here, from breaking up a couple of brawling pre-teens to dealing with a stink bombed Italian grocers. But then it shifts into gangster movie mode, as the tough who is collared for the stink bomb turns out to be one of the heavies for local mob kingpin Ritchie Garris (a babyfaced Donald Buka). The routine gives way to their pursuit of the Garris gang, who get drawn into a mob war with a cross-town rival. While all this is going on, the movie manages to squeeze in some light rom-comedy, as both Barnes and Purvis become enamored with the young secretary to their lieutenant, Katherine Mallory (Gale Storm). They have an awkward three-person date, and then the two cops move in next door to her, for some strained farce.

It’s one movie too many, but it’s held together by Douglas’ cold impassive tone and Diskant’s resourceful cinematography.  As Sean Axmaker noted in his article on the official TCM site, Diskant uses” chiaroscuro lighting of shadows and slashes of illumination in studio-set scenes, as in a shootout in a garage early in the film, [while] his location footage is defined by hard, single-source lighting, which gives the scenes a down-and-dirty immediacy.” There is an extraordinary car chase that zips through the Los Angeles bus depot and careens into a rural stretch of wood, the criminal jamming his rifle barrel through the back windshield, spraying death behind him. It is this chase that spells Barnes and Purvis’ doom. Their high-speed heroics initiate a whole cycle of vengeance that nearly immolates them all. And Purvis invites it. The quote at the top of the page, which seems painfully relevant in the light of recent events in Ferguson and NYC, is said by Katherine after Purvis slaps around an innocent nightclub singer. Desperate for a lead, Purvis finally crosses the line from silent to active hatred. There is an unconvincingly redemptive ending in which he makes peace with his demons by shooting them. Purvis walks out of the carnage smiling, flashbulbs popping. He is less an LAPD hero than a Travis Bickle in waiting.

The Leo Guild Novels

Ed here:  Many of my westerns are coming back in print and are readily available on Kindle as well as in new book editions. I've even gotten some mystery readers to actually buy one and like it. I think it was PW that said "Gorman writes westerns for people who don't read westerns." James and Livia Reasoner have been very helpful is getting my westerns to e book form. I want to thank them here.The following review is from Ben Boulden at Gravetapping.http://gravetapping.blogspot.com/

Leo Guild is an aging bounty hunter. He is a former lawman, father and husband, but that is all behind him. Now he rides alone. He is melancholy, intelligent and violent; when he needs to be. He also has a past that sticks with him. He killed a little girl. The courts forgave him, but he can’t find the heart to forgive himself.

Death Ground opens on the evening of Guild’s 54th birthday. In lonely celebration he makes a date at the local brothel with a young “straw-haired” girl. Things don’t go as expected with the girl and his birthday truly turns for the worse when he is summoned to the Sheriff’s office.

Two men are dead. One—Merle Rig—hired Guild as a bodyguard and the other—Kenny Tolliver—was technically Guild’s employee. He hired Kenny to protect Rig while he paid a visit to the "straw-haired" girl. As he looks at the cadavers on the heavy mortician’s tables he figures his job is gone and it is time to ride on, but first he pays a visit to Kenny’s mother. A scene that unsettles Guild and also piques his interest; Kenny’s mother knew Rig and Kenny palled around with a couple local deputies.

Leo Guild decides he can’t leave town until he figures who really killed the pair and why. He has a feeling it is not the violent mountain man being blamed by the Sheriff, but he doesn’t have many suspects. He doesn’t have anything but a hunch, really.

Death Ground isn’t a traditional Western. It, like all of Gorman’s Westerns, is a noir mystery wrapped in the trappings of the Old West. That is not to say that the historical element isn’t accurate or interesting, because it is. It is also central to the story, but an Ed Gorman Western is more of a historical mystery than anything else. A hardboiled historical mystery at that.

The prose is tough and tender in varying shades. It defines the story, action, and protagonist with a lean, smart and melancholy and literate style:

“Then he started digging snow up with both hands, and he covered them good, the two of them, and then he stood up and looked out on the unfurling white land. There was blue sky and a full yellow sun. Warmer now, there was even that kind of sweetness that comes on sunny winter days. It made him think of pretty women on ice skates, their cheeks touched perfect red by the cold, their eyes daring and blue.”

Leo Guild is an everyman. He is the man who does what needs to be done. He isn’t a hero, or a villain, but rather he is simply a man; a man who has seen much, done much, and lost much. Guild is an example of what makes Ed Gorman’s fiction so damn good: characters that are measured and three-dimensional; characters that act, feel and sound real. His male characters are strong and pitiful, lustful and scared, vain and dangerous, lonely and weak—generally all at the same time—and more importantly they are recognizable. And his female characters exhibit the same steady qualities. Neither wholly good nor bad, just human.

Death Ground is a Western that should have wide appeal. It will please the traditionalist with its rugged description of frontier life and the people who settled it. It will also introduce readers of hardboiled crime fiction to a new genre, but mostly it will please any reader who wants something tangible and meaningful mixed into a well-told, excellently plotted and immensely entertaining novel.

This one is well worth searching out.

Death Ground is the second of three novels to feature bounty man Leo Guild. It was originally published by Donald M. Evans in 1988. The other two are: Guild (1987) and Blood Game (1989). I have also read Blood Game, and it is every bit as good as Death Ground. I can only imagine that Guild holds it own as well.

Bill Pronzini's excellent story becomes short film

Hi Ed--

A budding Canadian college filmmaker named Spiro Kay asked my permission a while back to make a short, nonprofit film based on my horror short, "Peekaboo."    Here's the result, which he just sent me.  Really interesting take on the story, and very well done (though the ending could be a bit less murky).  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMCy5Ifh_CA&feature=youtu.be

Ed here: The story is Edgar worthy and the short film certainly captures the mood and ambience of it.  Be sure to check it out.

Fred Blosser reviews "Campbell's Kingdom"

YESTERDAY’S ADVENTURE: ‘CAMPBELL’S KINGDOM’ (1957)                      by Fred Blosser

Most of the adventure and thriller writers who crowded publishers’ lists in the 1950s and early 1960s are all but forgotten today.  Mention Victor Canning, Desmond Cory, Andrew Garve, William Haggard, Nicholas Monsarrat, or James Munro, and most people now will draw a blank.  Blame changing tastes and dramatic shifts in global politics, not any intrinsic lack of quality in the novels themselves.  And don’t forget a rather significant element of luck.  I mean, what if Ian Fleming had stuck by his Reichenbach moment for 007 at the end of “From Russia With Love” (1957),  and the Bond series had ended there with the first five books, before the advent of Doctor No, Goldfinger, SPECTRE, and the films?  Would Fleming and Bond be anything more than footnotes in a dusty bibliography today? 
Canning, Cory, Garve, W. Haggard, Monsarrat, Munro -- and add Hammond Innes as another of those storytellers from the era between WWII and Vietnam whom you have to go to used-book dealers or, in some cases, obscure e-books to find nowadays.  Yet he was popular enough in the ‘50s that his novels inspired three relatively high-profile movies, including 1957’s “Campbell’s Kingdom,” directed by Ralph Thomas and starring three leading British movie actors of the day (Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, and Michael Craig), with several other “I think I recognize that guy” faces in the supporting cast (James Robertson Justice, Finlay Currie, Sid James, John Laurie, Robert Brown).
“Campbell’s Kingdom” still turns up on the TCM channel occasionally in an uncharacteristically mediocre print, and a DVD edition is available from VCI.  In Innes’ rugged story,  insurance clerk Bruce Campbell (Bogarde) comes to the Canadian Rockies from London to claim a sprawling high-valley tract left to him by his late grandfather.  The old man believed that there was oil on the property, and died after a geologist’s report failed to find the right geologic conditions.  
Campbell originally plans a brief visit to settle his grandfather’s estate, but stays around when he comes to suspect that Owen Morgan, the boss of a dam construction project that will flood the valley (Baker), tampered with the report.  Campbell, told by his doctor in London that he an incurable disease and only has six months to live, decides to fight for his property, keep the ruthless Morgan and his crew at bay, and find oil before the dam can be finished.
I imagine that the Rank Organization, which produced the film, took the option on Innes’ novel because it gave them a chance to make an English version of a modern-day Western picture at a time when American Westerns were big box-office around the world.  If you liked the old Roy and Gene movies where the cowboys were as likely to ride pickup trucks as horses, or the Westerns where the underestimated tenderfoot shows the tough guys at the local saloon a thing or two, you’ll probably like “Campbell’s Kingdom.”
Bogarde and Baker are well matched as the antagonists.  Had it been an American production transposed to the U.S. Rockies, Glenn Ford probably would have played Campbell and Kirk Douglas would have played Morgan.  As much as I like Ford and Douglas, I don’t think they could have done any better than Bogarde and Baker.  Today’s casting in the same roles: James McAvoy and Jason Statham?  But . . .would a  movie in which the good guy is an oil prospector fly with today’s green-minded audiences?  Probably not.  And, at the risk of revealing a spoiler, the resolution of Campbell’s health problem in the final scene is a little too neat; but who wants an unhappy ending when the underdog squares off against overwhelming odds?   

New Books BLIND VENGEANCE by Barry Hoffman

Barry Hoffman returns with his fifth book in the critically acclaimed EYES series.Teenager Renee LeShay has been kidnapped by Norman Flowers, an unhinged victim of homicide detective Lamar Briggs, who thinks he has abducted Briggs’s daughter Alexis. Shara Farris, a bounty hunter and Renee’s legal guardian, has to unmask and locate the abductor before he tires of torturing Renee and kills her. Renee, aware she is not the intended victim, assumes Alexis’s identity and engages in a battle of wills with her kidnapper.A taut tale of full of twists and turns with Renee’s sanity and life in the balance.From Barry Hoffmann
 Blind Vengeance is the 5th book in the “Eyes” series. Blind Rage will be the sixth and final book in the series. My feeling is for a series to be successful the main character must grow with each book. When I’ve squeezed all there is from a character the series should end.  Shara Farris went from serial killer to bounty hunter/private investigator. Blind Vengeance fleshes out her character while another recent series regular becomes more important (the focus of the last book is more on her). The dynamic between the two and the murder they must solve is what will attract followers of the series.