Three Strikes: 3 Authors 3 Novellas

Crime fiction aficionados with a taste for the offbeat will be rewarded. --Publishers Weekly 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 1970s 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 OMara Aggie is back in business. Hes no longer smoking bootleg cigarettes as he did in Smoked now hes smuggling another usually legal-and quite valuable-products: maple syrup. Unfortunately on the way from the Midwest to New York City hes 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 hes gotta play hero. Again. The Maybrick Affair by Charles Salzberg As World War II rages in Europe its 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 womans 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 Americas entry into the War.