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