VJ Books has received: Chuck Palahniuk – Tell-All, David Goodwillie – American Subversive, and Ace Atkins – Infamous.

Brilliant criminal writer Ace Atkins is the April 2010 Favorite Author at VJ Books.

Before turning to writing full time, Atkins worked as a crime reporter in the newsroom of The Tampa Tribune for several years. Here he earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination and Livingston Award nomination for his seven-part series about an unsolved murder of a Tampa socialite in 1956, “Tampa Confidential,” which had the whole city buzzing for weeks.

Over the past decade, Ace Atkins has been building up an immense following for his engaging fiction based on actual historical events. An amazingly thorough researcher, Atkins writes with authority using his extensive reading of historical records to create compelling fiction.

Ace Atkins is also the author of four… (more…)

(Publisher’s Weekly, Feb. 9)

The 1921 rape/manslaughter trial of silent film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle provides the gritty backdrop for Atkins’s outstanding crime novel, in which Dashiell Hammett, then a Pinkerton operative living in San Francisco, plays a significant role. A wild party Arbuckle throws at San Francisco’s posh St. Francis Hotel results in tragedy after an actress, Virginia Rappe, is mysteriously injured and later dies. As the author explains in a “behind the story” introduction, the future creator of Sam Spade was actually assigned to help the defense on the Arbuckle case. With enviable ease, Atkins (Wicked City) brings to life Hammett, Arbuckle, William Randolph Hearst and other real figures of the period. Those familiar with the historical case will be impressed by how well the book meshes fact and fiction. Genre fans who enjoy the grim realism of James Ellroy‘s post-WWII Los Angeles will find a lot to like in Atkins‘s Prohibition-era San Francisco. (Apr.)

Order your signed copy of The Devil’s Garden by Ace Atkins at www.vjbooks.com today!

Hello again~

You’ll want to check out our recent notice –

Nearly 25 years ago we first met Alex Delaware, and he returns in his 23rd mystery in Jonathan Kellerman’s True Detectives.  Walter Mosley launches what promises to be his best series since Easy Rawlins first appeared in 1990 with The Long Fall.

Readers of historical adventure writers James Rollins, Raymond Khoury, Steve Berry and Clive Cussler take notice of Alexander Cipher, an exciting debut by newcomer Will Adams.

Ace Atkins brings the 1921 Fatty Arbuckle case alive in Devil’s Garden, and Philip Kerr’s private detective Berney Gunther travels to 1950s Argentina in A Quiet Flame.  He delivers compelling portraits of real characters such as Eva and Juan Peron, Adolf Eichmann, and Otto Skorzeny in a novel that ends up asking some highly provocative questions about the true extent of Argentina’s Nazi collaboration and anti-Semitism under the Perons.

Today’s selection is rounded out by two recent finds:  Michael Palmer’s 2007 bestseller, The Fifth Vial  and Manda Scott‘s first title in her bestselling Boudica series Dreaming The Eagle.  Quantities are limited on both, so don’t delay.

Plenty to consider here!

John and Virginia

Ace Atkins is the author of six novels, including his latest, Wicked City, from G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

A former journalist who cut his teeth as a crime reporter in the newsroom of The Tampa Tribune, he published his first novel, Crossroad Blues, at 27 and became a full-time novelist at 30.

While at the Tribune, Ace earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination for a feature series based on his investigation into a forgotten murder of the 1950s. The story became the core of his critically acclaimed novel, White Shadow, which earned raves from noted authors and critics. The Associated Press said the story “succeeds both as a first-rate historical novel and as a superb crime story.’’ Michael Connelly called the novel “a tour de force from one of the best crime writers working today.’’

With White Shadow and now with Wicked City, Ace carved out a niche as both a talented storyteller and a meticulous journalist, blending first-hand interviews and research into police and court records with tightly woven plots and incisive characters. Ace’s novels tell great American stories, weaving fact and fiction into a colorful, seamless tapestry.

Wicked City is Ace’s most personal book to date, set in a vice-ridden Alabama town 20 miles from where he attended high school and college. While many of the characters in Wicked City are historical figures and some are drawn from the imagination, others are composites taken from Ace’s rich family history of Alabama bootleggers, tied to Southern-fried political corruption and demagoguery in the 1940s and ‘50s.

Atkins, now 37, lives on a historic farm outside Oxford, Mississippi with his family.