Rhys Bowen teaches a workshop on researching and writing historical fiction

Limited to 20. 888-560-9919 to register

Admission: The purchase of one copy of her new book  The Last Mrs. Summers (Berkley $26)  which The Pen launches on August 4 at 6:00 PM (9:00 PM ET)

This is our July Crime Book of the Month and signed copies are sold out. A reason to sign up for one or more Books of the Month Club....

Beauregard "Bug" Montage is an honest mechanic, a loving husband, and a hard-working dad. Bug knows there's no future in the man he used to be: known from the hills of North Carolina to the beaches of Florida as the best wheelman on the East Coast. He thought he'd left all that behind him, but as his carefully built new life begins to crumble, he finds himself drawn inexorably back into a world of blood and bullets. 

Patrick says, "Mechanic Beauregard "Bug" Montage is determined to keep things on the straight and narrow, working hard and doing his best to keep his garage open. With an economy that's in the tank, however, Bug's bills are piling up. His ornery, chain-smoking mother is about to get kicked out of her nursing home, his business is about to go into foreclosure, and Bug's prospects aren't looking too good. So, when a slick-talking grifter approaches Bug to take the wheel as the getaway driver in a jewel heist caper, our man reluctantly agrees. It is the classic noir set-up: a good man who wants to put the past behind but is lured back into the game. Can he redeem himself and get back on track, or is there a part of his own nature that wants him back in the driver's seat, consequences be damned? I sure wish I'd been aware of Cosby when I was putting together  The Highway Kind ($15.99) my anthology of car-related crime stories. I definitely would have hit this terrific author up for a story. Don't miss this one, folks." 

And, "Every once in a while a writer comes along with an incredible voice. Think Elmore Leonard, or Chester Himes...add S. A. Cosby to that list."-Steve Cavanagh, agreeing with Lee Child and Patrick. I would nod to Walter Mosley as well.

Cosby received a terrific review in Sunday's NY Times Book Review, which says, looking at today's noir,

"To freshen up the vibe, some inventive authors have switched the gender of our brooding dicks, troubled them with Tourette's, launched them out to space. What about a Black mechanic from the sticks, haunted by the ghost of his missing father? Enter Beauregard "Bug" Montage, the protagonist of S. A. Cosby's "Blacktop Wasteland," a gritty, thrilling reminder that small-town America has an underbelly, too.... 

Beauregard's story begins with a high-stakes road race, on a potholed byway, accompanied by a chorus of crickets and whippoorwills. Cosby immediately displays a talent for well-tuned action, raising our heart rates and filling our nostrils with odors of gun smoke and burned rubber. But the real draw here is his evocative depiction of rural Virginia and its denizens. Cosby's voice is distinctive, and he plays a sharp-tongued Virgil as we descend into the Hades of bucolic poverty."

WEDNESDAY JULY 29 12:00 PM

A multitude of lies swirls around the supposedly happy marriage of Daisy, a London primary school teacher, and Simon Barnes, an interior designer. Six years earlier, their family seemed to be complete with the birth of a daughter after a decade of trying to conceive and endless rounds of IVF failures. But Simon, who drinks to excess and "holds no truck with contentment," demands they try for a second child, no matter the financial or emotional cost, especially for Daisy. Simon's alcoholism spirals out of control, exacerbated when he learns it may be impossible for them to conceive. Soon, Simon is missing family events, staying out all night, and taking his anger out on Daisy. Then, Simon's behavior at their best friends' party results in a near fatal car accident. Much worse follows... Parks paints a dark portrait of how alcoholism can tear a whole house as well as friends, even bystanders, down.

Stephanie Wrobel discusses The Recovery of Rose Gold 

"Rachel Cunningham, the protagonist of this devastating, magic realism-dusted psychological thriller has been guilt-ridden for 15 years since a twin tragedy she can't remember-her mother's murder and father's apparent suicide-when she was 11 at her family's vast wilderness estate on Michigan's Upper Peninsula."

Rachel has voluntarily confined herself to a decaying mental institution, where one day she gains access to the original police report, obtained somehow by a fellow patient's brother, that sparks the faint hope she's not responsible for her parents' deaths-and sends her back to the family estate, where her brilliant but scary older sister, Diana, and their aunt still live, to try to figure out what really happened. But Rachel's mission soon becomes far more perilous than she anticipated. 

As Rachel scrambles to remain undetected, the tension at times becomes almost unbearable, especially as the reader becomes privy to critical information unknown to Rachel via flashbacks narrated by her late mother. "Dionne paints a haunting portrait of a family hurtling toward the tragic destiny they can foresee but are powerless to stop." 

Not sure I agree about powerless to stop. What is devastating is Dionne's ruthless portrait of a true psychopath and an unwillingness to acknowledge one -- something often seen in real life.