BooksChatter: ☀ Third Degree: 3 Authors, 3 Novellas [3]

Thank you for joining us on the Virtual Book Tour for Third Degree, a Crime Collection by Ross Klavan, Tim O'Mara, and Charles Salzberg (5 October 2020, Down & Out Books, 274 pages).

This is the third book in the 3 Authors, 3 Novellas series.

Don't miss our guest post by author Ross Klavan, a craft essay "On Writing What You Don't Want To Write".

PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and the Kindle Cloud Reader Preview below, as well as details of the other books in the series.

The authors will be awarding a $20 Amazon gift card to two randomly drawn winners via Rafflecopter during the tour. Please do take part: comment on our post and follow the tour where you will be able to read other excerpts (☀), interviews (ℚ), reviews (✍) and guest blog posts (✉).

|| The Novellas || Teaser: KCR Preview || The Series || Author Guest Post || About the Authors || Giveaway & Tour Stops ||

The Novellas

|| Cut Loose All Those Who Drag You Down || Beaned || The Fifth Column ||

Cut Loose All Those Who Drag You Down by Ross Klavan

The story of what turns out to be a very, very bad night.

A crooked reporter who fronts for the mob and who’s been married eight times is minding his own business at home when he gets a sudden visit from his oldest friend, a disgraced and defrocked shrink. The man is in deep trouble. He needs a place to hide.

The problem is, he refuses to admit to exactly what’s wrong and so there begins a heated, drunken, drug fueled discussion that runs through failed marriages, divorces, mistresses, murders, suicides, police raids that went wrong, meetings with strange women in the desert, a child with killing on his mind and more.

When it’s finished, the answer to what’s wrong becomes horribly clear…and somebody is going to pay with his life.

Beaned by Tim O'Mara

Hours after successfully transporting smuggled maple syrup from Missouri to New York City, and picking up a truckload of maple-syrup related products for the return trip, Aggie and his new partners decide it’s more important to help take down a sex-trafficking ring based out of Manhattan.

Taking care of business first—trading the maple-syrup products for high-end coffee beans and distributing the new cargo—Aggie takes off for The Big Apple.

His mission: help take down the billionaire who’s funding the trafficking of under-aged children for the pleasure of other rich folks. His trip takes him to Manhattan’s toney Upper East Side to a final confrontation in the US Virgin Islands.

The Fifth Column by Charles Salzberg

Several months after the shock of Pearl Harbor thrusts America into the war, Jake Harper, a young Connecticut reporter, gets his dream job on a New York City Newspaper.

Returning to the city of his birth, Jake meets a young boy who's been bullied and savagely beaten in a schoolyard by a bunch of young toughs wearing Brown shirts and railing against Jews.

Jake, who smells a possible story, suspects the resurgence of the German-American Bund on the Upper East Side. As he digs deeper, he begins to suspect that the supposedly disbanded Bund is alive and well and making plans to sabotage the American war effort.

Teaser: KCR Preview

Third Degree
Available NOW!

The Series: 3 Authors, 3 Novellas

|| Triple Shot || Three Strikes ||

Click on the book cover to Look Inside the book on Amazon and read an excerpt.

Triple Shot [1]

Shadow towns, smugglers and secret notes—this trio of New York authors are a TRIPLE SHOT of twists and turns in three novellas.

Payback leads to an unmarked grave in Ross Klavan’s Thump Gun Hitched. A freak accident forces two L.A. cops to play out a deadly obsession that takes them from back alley payoffs to hard time in prison, then deep into the tunnel networks south of the border to a murderous town that’s only rumored to exist. Before the last shot is fired, everything they thought was certain proves to be a shadow and everything they trusted opens into a trap.

Life was so much simpler for Tim O’Mara’s marijuana-selling narrator in Smoked when all he had to worry about was keeping his customers, now ex-wife, and daughter satisfied. When he forges a reluctant alliance with his ex-wife’s new lover, he realizes there’s lots of money to be made from the world’s number one smuggled legal product—cigarettes. Unfortunately, his latest shipment contained some illegal automatic weapons. Now he’s playing with the big boys and finds the price of the game way over his head. Murder was never part of his business model.

And finally in Twist of Fate, Charles Salzberg follows Trish Sullivan, an ambitious TV reporter working in a small, upstate New York market. She receives a note from Meg Montgomery, a beautiful young woman convicted of murdering her husband and two children. Montgomery claims she’s innocent and Sullivan, smelling a big story that may garner some national attention, investigates and turns up evidence that the woman has, indeed, been framed. What happens next changes the life of both women in unexpected ways.

[Published 1 August 2016, 320 pages]

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Three Strikes [2]

I Take Care of Myself in Dreamland by Ross Klavan

Bartok is left with scars from the Army but something else, as well-the memory of a strange, mystical experience that he calls “Red River.” Back home and out of luck, he wanders through 1970’s New York hoping to recapture this strange state. But others see Bartok as an easy mark for some very dirty business and their plan is to use him for murder.

Jammed by Tim O’Mara

Aggie is back in business. He’s no longer smoking bootleg cigarettes as he did in “Smoked,” now he’s smuggling another usually legal-and quite valuable-products: maple syrup. Unfortunately, on the way from the Midwest to New York City, he’s picked up an unwanted traveling companion, the fifteen-year-old daughter of his latest boss. It seems she wants to get to NYC to meet up with her on-line boyfriend, who turns out to be much more than she expected. All Aggie wants to do is drop off the syrup, pick up a paycheck, and get on home. Before he does that, he’s gotta play hero. Again.

The Maybrick Affair by Charles Salzberg

As World War II rages in Europe, it’s a couple weeks before Pearl Harbor and rookie reporter, Jake Harper, who works for a small Connecticut newspaper, is assigned a routine human interest story. A reclusive, elderly woman, has quietly passed away in her small cottage upstate. As Jake investigates the old woman’s life and death he finds that years earlier she was tried and convicted of murdering her husband in a well-publicized, lurid trial in London, England. And, after digging further, he, unearths evidence that she might have had a connection to an even more famous British serial killer and that the ramifications of this story might affect America’s entry into the War.

[Published 26 August 2018, 286 pages]

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About the Author

|| Ross Klavan || Tim O'Mara || Charles Salzberg ||

Ross Klavan has published two other noir novellas with Down and Out: “I Take Care Of Myself In Dreamland” and “Thumpgun Hitched” both in collections with Charles Salzberg and Tim O’Mara.

His darkly comic novel “Schmuck” was published by Greenpoint Press in 2014. Klavan’s screenplay for the film Tigerland was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and was directed by Joel Schumacher, starring Colin Farrell.

He’s written screenplays for InterMedia, Walden Media, Miramax, Paramount, A&E and TNT.

As a performer, Klavan’s voice has been heard in dozens of feature films including “Revolutionary Road,” “Sometimes in April,” “Casino,” “In and Out,” and “You Can Count On Me” as well as in numerous TV and radio commercials.

In other lives, he was a reporter and anchorman for WINS Radio, RKO Network and LBC (London, England) and a member of the NYC alternative art group Four Walls.

He lives in New York City.

Follow Ross Klavan:

Tim O’Mara is the Barry-nominated (he didn’t win) author of the Raymond Donne mystery novels.

He’s also the editor of the short crime story anthology Down to the River, published by Down & Out Books.

Along with Smoked and Jammed, Beaned completes the Aggie Trilogy.

Follow Tim O'Mara:

Charles Salzberg, a former magazine journalist and nonfiction book writer, has been nominated for two Shamus Awards, for Swann's Last Song and Second Story Man.

He is the author of five Henry Swann novels, Devil in the Hole, called one of the best crime novels of 2013 by Suspense magazine, Second Story Man, winner of the Beverly Hills Book Award, and his novellas Twist of Fate and The Maybrick Affair, appeared in Triple Shot and Three Strikes.

His short stories have appeared in Long Island Noir (Akashic), Mystery Tribune and the crime anthology Down to the River (edited by Tim O'Mara).

He is a Founding Member of New York Writers Workshop and is on the board of MWA-NY, and PrisonWrites.

Follow Charles Salzberg: