Pre-holiday BFP news!

This has been a busy week for Busted Flush Press, and we have much to share...

Reed Farrel Coleman

NPR's Maureen Corrigan discusses her favorite books of 2009 today on Fresh Air, including "a terrific new mystery series... a wise independent bookseller recommended that I read"... that would be Reed Farrel Coleman's Moe Prager series. Read the story & hear the podcast here.

For those who are already fans of Moe, there is imminent good news on the horizon. Busted Flush Press is on the verge of acquiring the reprint rights for the 4th & 5th books in the series: the Edgar, Macavity nominated and Shamus Award-winning Soul Patch and the Shamus Award-winning Empty Ever After. If all things go as planned, both books will be out just in time for the release of Moe #6, Innocent Monster, due out in October 2010. Please stay tuned for more updates.

Margaret Maron

Check out the news on BFP acquiring Edgar/Agatha/Anthony/Macavity Award winner Margaret Maron's 1985 stand-alone Southern crime novel, Bloody Kin, reported on the blog last week.

Don Winslow

Busted Flush Press will be reprinting Don Winslow's incredibly hard-to-find, Edgar Award-nominated crime series featuring private investigator Neal Carey. Winslow has recently attained bestsellerdom & critical acclaim for his later novels, including The Power of the Dog, The Death and Life of Bobby Z, California Fire and Life, The Winter of Frankie Machine, and one of my favorite books of 2008, The Dawn Patrol. But for years fans have been looking for his early, wonderful Carey novels... and now they'll be available again, beginning fall 2010, when the first, A Cool Breeze on the Underground, is published. To follow: The Trail to Buddha's Mirror, Way Down on the High Lonely, A Long Walk up the Water Slide, and While Drowning in the Desert.

I asked Don what he thinks about seeing these books back in print for the first time in over a decade...

"I'm absolutely delighted that the Neal Carey series is coming back into print. I don't think I've made a public appearance in ten years when I wasn't asked about these books. A Cool Breeze on the Underground holds a special place for me -- it was my first book, and I wrote it literally all over the world -- in tents in Africa, Buddhist monasteries in China, college rooms in Oxford. I think it was rejected by the first fourteen publishers who saw it -- including the publisher I'm with now, Simon & Schuster. Then it was nominated for an Edgar. Anyway, it's great to see these books coming back into print, and I'm really excited to be working with good friends at Busted Flush. The last time I saw David, we shared a candlelit (by necessity) dinner -- burgers with bags of chips -- al fresco in just-post-hurricane Houston, and it's my favorite meal ever on a book tour. This is going to be genuine fun."

Daniel Woodrell

Busted Flush Press will reprint Daniel Woodrell's stand-alone novels, Tomato Red and The Death of Sweet Mister, with new forewords for each. Edgar Award-winning crime writer Megan Abbott (Bury Me Deep) will pen the foreword to Tomato Red (to be published in fall 2010), and best-selling novelist Dennis Lehane (The Given Day) will provide the foreword to The Death of Sweet Mister (to be published in spring 2011). I'll be posting another blog entry later this week about Woodrell, "an amazing genius" (Ken Bruen), but it's safe to say he's one of today's finest novelists (of any genre) that most people just don't know about... yet. Check back later this week to see what some of his peers think of his work (including Megan Abbott, Joe R. Lansdale, Allan Guthrie, Reed Farrel Coleman, and more). In the meantime, rush out and buy his novel, Winter's Bone (Back Bay Books), which was my wife's favorite novel of 2006 (and which will be in next month's Sundance Film Festival Dramatic Competition). More to come...

Later this week on the BFP blog: Daniel Woodrell; the conclusion to Ace Atkin's Christmas-set short story, "Last Fair Deal Gone Down"; and more!

Happy holidays from Busted Flush Press!