Bad Moon Rising Keep on Chuggin'

(available on Kindle for $9.95)

Bad Moon Rising hit #11 on Baker & Taylor's Top Selling Mysteries last week. Here are some new review quotes:

"As the story unfolds, motivations, opportunities and actions all are called into question. It's a fast-paced story that will have the reader turning pages to get to the end." --Grift U.K.

"Like Ed Gorman's other shrewdly plotted books about lawyer Sam McCain, "Bad Moon Rising" (Pegasus, 208 pp., $25) takes its title from a pop song. It's the summer of 1968, the Chicago Seven are frolicking at the Democratic Convention, and hippies — still exotic creatures — have settled near McCain's small Iowa town. --Seattle Times

Then something dark and sinister rears its head later in the novel, and Sam faces a large personal challenge. Hopefully, more titles will follow as we await what fate lurks down the pike for our man Sam. Entertaining, articulate, and just a good PI story, Bad Moon Rising was a first-rate read." -- Goodreads

"Gorman offers readers his richest portrait yet about Black River Falls and its people." --The Reading Room


From Viewshound (UK)

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Ed Gorman: noir novelist for liberals
Ed Gorman's characters are as tough and worldly as any you'll find in the literature of noir, crime and politics. Hard to believe Gorman's a liberal. He is.
By Matt Paust - Tuesday 25 Oct 2011

Come gather round, liberals, you're not far from home…

Disclosure: I'm a gun nut and enjoy hard-boiled detective novels in which the participants use guns and know the difference between a revolver, a semi-automatic (autoloading) pistol and a (fully automatic) submachinegun.

Politically I'm a liberal, knowing full well many of my liberal brothers and sisters would breathe easier if all guns were suddenly to vanish, or, more realistically, end up in the hands of only military personnel and police officers, or, even more realistically, those of the aforementioned and, with grave reservations, folks with federal licenses, preferably those issued by a liberal Democrat-controlled regime.

Ed Gorman's novels reflect an outlook compatible with this stricter view on the gun issue. Yet, I'm addicted to his writing. I know. WTF? Brothers and sisters, could this mean there is hope for me? Or might it mean simply that Ed Gorman's novels are so good I can abide this chasm of outlook between us? For now, I'm going with a "yes" on the second question.

Come writers and bloggers who proselytize your ken…

Ed is a storyteller, not a preacher. I can imagine myself sitting next to him at an Irish bar hearing the stories straight from his mouth between sips of cold draft beer. I can imagine myself suspending any irritation should an occasional sour political note slip out between the sips and the quips if the stories compel and the beer stays cold. Same with books. Politics are schmolitics to me if I'm caught up in a good yarn filled with colorful characters who come alive on the page. Like Ed's.

Ed writes in several genres — mysteries, westerns, noir, fantasy, short stories, and possibly one or two I'm overlooking — and is prolific in all of them. My introduction to his work came several years ago when my wife gave me one of his mystery novels for Father's Day. It was one of his Sam McCain series of detective stories set in a small Iowa town in the 1950s. I liked it so much I've since read them all. The seventh, Ticket to Ride, came out in March.

Published last fall, his political mystery Stranglehold, is the second in what promises to become a new series featuring political consultant Dev Conrad. It's a tale of murder and blackmail set inside a congressional campaign that held my interest as closely as any mystery I've ever read. Ed's characters are people I know or have known, liked, loved or hated.

Ed always includes at least one literary quote at the front of each novel. As additional evidence that Ed is a novelist for us liberals I offer that his Thomas Jefferson quote says nothing about blood and the tree of liberty. It's this one:

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

And there's this one from the late Baltimore newspaper sage H.L. Mencken:

Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right.

Oh, the times they ain't a-chaaaaangin'.

A