 | |
Books by Reed ColemanEmpty Ever After  April 15, 2008 Shamus Award winner for Best Novel Price $14.95, trade paperback ISBN-10: 1932557644 ISBN-13: 978-1932557640 Bleak House Books See the tour info here! There are no second acts for the dead...or are there? For over twenty years, retired NYPD officer and PI Moe Prager, has been haunted by the secret that would eventually destroy his family. Now, two years after the fallout from the truth, more than secrets are haunting the Prager family. Moe Prager follows a trail of graverobbers from cemetery to cemetery, from ashes to ashes and back again in order to finally solve the enigma of his dead brother-in-law Patrick. He plunges deeper into the dark recesses of his past than ever before, revisiting all of his old cases, in order to uncover the twisted alchemy of vengeance and resurrection. Will Moe, at last, put his past to rest? Will he find the man who belongs in that vacant grave or will it remain empty, empty ever after? Walking the Perfect Square 
April 7, 2008paperback Busted Flush Press ISBN-10: 0979270952 ISBN-13: 978-0979270956 Read an excerpt here! Recently retired due to a freak accident, NYPD officer Moe Prager is lost. In pain and without the job he loves, Moe relunctantly settles on the notion of going into the wine business with his brother. When a suburban college student vanishes off the streets of Manhattan, Prager's universe is turned upside down and his life changed forever. Hired by the student's desperate family, Moe plunges deep into the world of New York s punk underground, sex clubs, and biker bars. Politicians, journalists, and crooked cops seem hell-bent on stopping him in his tracks. Set on the gritty city streets of the late seventies and the present day, Walking the Perfect Square is a unique mystery that delivers a compelling look at one person's efforts to find a man who was never really there and to protect his family from an unbearable truth. Read an excerpt here. Redemption Street 
December 2007Price $13, trade paperback ISBN: 978-0-9792709-0-1 First time in paperback! Busted Flush Press In Redemption Street, ex-NYPD officer and freshly minted PI Moe Prager, travels up to a decaying Boscht Belt hotel to uncover the truth behind a decades old fire that killed seventeen people, including his high school crush. Away from his beloved Brooklyn and out of his element, Moe finds that the locals aren't as eager to dredge up the painful past or to stir up the embers of that long dead fire as he seems to be. In fact the cast of locals-a washed up comedian, an ambitious politician, a corrupt cop, a pint-sized Hitler, the leader of a mysterious Jewish cult-seem rather intent on doing their level best to make certain the circumstances surrounding the fire stay buried along with the charred bodies of the dead. Moe Prager's gift, however, is coaxing secrets out of the silent past. But will the truth lead to Redemption Street or his own dead end? Soul Patch 
the fourth Moe Prager mystery Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel Price: $23.95 Bleak House Books In this darkly intriguing follow-up to the Shamus and Barry winning The James Deans, ex-NYPD cop turned P.I. and entrepreneur, Moe Prager is faced with a gut-wrenching case. The apparent suicide of his old friend and NYPD Chief of Detectives, Larry McDonald, forces Moe back onto the decaying Coney Island streets he patrolled when he was in uniform. But now, beneath the boardwalk and behind the rusted and crumbling rides of the midway, he finds a trail of death, betrayal, and corruption reaching back to 1972. As Faulkner once said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” So it goes for Moe Prager in Soul Patch. Winner of the 2008 Shamus Award for Best Novel Nominated for
Redemption Street 
(re-released by Busted Flush Press, Dec. 2007)released by Viking in 2004 It's 1981. Ex NYC cop Moe Prager's comfortable new life is turned on its ear when he is hired to investigate an old fire at a Borscht Belt hotel. The 1966 fire took the lives of 17 people, mostly kids up from the city working in the mountains for the summer. As fate would have it, two of the teenage girls who perished in the fire had been Moe's high school classmates. One of the dead girls, Andrea Cotter, had been the object of Moe's adolescent affections. Follow Moe Prager as he traverses a minefield of charred bodies, scarred lives, ambitious politicians and corrupt cops. Was the fire really caused by some fool smoking in bed or was it arson? Will the long dead keep their secrets or will they rise up to help Moe Prager uncover the truth? Will the truth lead down a blind alley or to the bright lights on Redemption Street?  
Walking the Perfect SquareHardcover: Permanent Press February 1, 2002 ISBN: 1579620396 Paperback: Plume January 28, 2003 ISBN: 0452283892 August 6th, 1998: Moe Prager, a former cop, waits to call his daughter for her 18th birthday. In the midst of an ugly family meltdown, Prager is desperate to find a way to make sense of what has caused his once-happy family to implode. As he waits, however, it is Prager who receives a call that might not only solve a case that has haunted him and his wife for twenty years, but might also supply the glue to patch his family back together. December 8th, 1977: Patrick Maloney, a supposedly popular college student, walks out of a Manhattan nightspot into oblivion. It's no wonder Maloney's disappearance barely registers on the radar screen. Son of Sam strikes. Elvis is Dead. It's the Sex Pistols vs. the Bee Gees, Studio 54 and the Dirt Lounge, est and yin/yang, gas shortages, Quaaludes, pot and polyester, Plato's Retreat, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the neutron bomb. Moe Prager, a cop forced into early retirement by injury, certainly hadn't noticed Patrick Maloney's disappearance. But when Prager's ex-partner calls with an offer to work on the case, Moe, wracked with self-doubt over his undistinguished career, signs on. As Prager traces Patrick Maloney's steps from his upstate home to his college dorm on Long Island, from the Tribeca bar where he was last seen to an old flame's mansion on the Gold Coast, Moe realizes that nothing about the case, especially the details of the missing man's life, is as it seems. Even the picture of his parents gave the police was two years out of date. Why? What could his parents be hiding? What tortured secrets might have driven Patrick to create a public persona so different from his true self? Questions multiply as Prager searches for Patrick in New York's notorious punk underground, gay clubs and biker bars. Will Moe's blossoming relationship with Patrick's older sister help to bring Maloney back home or will it help to destroy any progress in the case? Can Moe overcome the roadblocks thrown in his path by dirty cops, corrupt politicians, and an ambitious reporter? And who are the truly ominous forces working behind the scenes to pull Prager into the very private hell of the Maloney family? Is Moe Prager running in circles or simply walking the perfect square? 
They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee
Hardcover: 208 pagesPublisher: Permanent Press December 1997 ASIN: 1877946958 Dylan Klein, insurance investigator cum novelist, returns home from Hollywood to attend his father's funeral. After the burial, Klein learns that his nephew Zak is missing. Unable to get satisfactory answers as to the whereabouts of his son, Klein's older brother, Jeffrey, enlists the aid of Dylan and Dylan's most trusted friend, retired NYPD detective Johnny MacClough. They soon discover Zak's trail is not only icy cold, but paved in layers of blood and intrigue. Their search leads them to a tranquil college town on the Canadian border. There, they stumble blindly into an underworld of murderers and international drug smugglers. Even as they pick up faint traces of Zak, MacClough is haunted by the specter of a twenty-year-old kidnapping case that had catapulted him to the rank of detective. Can Klein and MacClough continue to work together as the shocking facts about that old case erodes their friendship? Distracted by his grief and the search for Zak, torn between his loyalty to MacClough and his desire for truth, a vulnerable Klein falls under the spell of a mysterious young woman. But is she what she claims to be, or she too have her own dark secrets? And what of the genius computer hacker Klein takes on in order to find his missing nephew? Will these desperate measures lead to Zak or to disaster? They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee is both a taut thriller and an exploration of the ties that bind. Where do love and allegiance end, and where does the truth begin? These are the dilemmas Dylan Klein must face in Reed Coleman's third Dylan Klein mystery. 
Life Goes SleepingHardcover: 271 pages Publisher: Permanent Press August 1991 ISBN: 1877946052 Dylan Klein, in a bush league insurance investigator, returns to his old Brooklyn neighborhood for his mother's funeral. Alienated from his family and by the rituals of his faith, unable to reach the grief he knows is there, Klein sets out on a journey fraught with treason, murder, and betrayal. Klein and his close friend, ex-New York City Police detective Johnny MacClough, stumble through an odyssey fueled by the winds of change: winds themselves created by a thawing in the Cold War. Klein and MacClough are buffeted as the two super powers struggle to erase some potentially embarrassing loose ends left dangling since WWII. Another player, a "wanna-be" power, injects poison into the brew in an attempt to snag the loose ends for its own purposes: political blackmail or, maybe, just revenge. Ultimately, however, Life Goes Sleeping is not a spy/thriller, but rather a hardboiled detective novel rooted in the traditions of the 30's and 40's. Klein is a man trading water for his life. When one of his clients is brutally murdered, he is forced to learn how to swim or drown. Johnny MacClough is both his lifeguard and his instructor. These men are too preoccupied with the small picture - namely, their own survival - to worry about politics and matters of state. For them, the puzzle pieces multiply. The game keeps getting more complex, but someone's neglected to send them a rule book. Working with an intensity born of desperation to untangle the webs that has trapped them, Klein and MacClough's ultimate rewards are discoveries about their own lives - lives that will no longer go on sleeping. 
Little EasterHardcover: 221 pages Publisher: Permanent Press March 1993 ISBN: 1877946230 Dylan Klein, having come into some money during his last case, has given up his distinguished career as an insurance investigator in order to pursue his dream as a writer. But like stray light near a black hole, Klein is sucked into the vacuum of a deadly love triangle by the appearance of a mysterious woman and her subsequent execution. Klein, alarmed that his best friend -- ex-New York City detective Johnny MacClough -- might somehow be involved, temporarily turns in his pen for the tools of the trade. With the questionable assistance of an alcoholic newspaper woman and a notorious criminal lawyer, Dylan Klein plunges headlong into the quicksand of organized crime and the powerful men behind it. Klein faces enormous problems in his quest, not the least of which is Johnny MacClough's stubborn refusal to cooperate. If anything, the ex-detective appears bound and determined to sabotage the efforts being made on his behalf. Further complicating Klein's travails is the potential fallout from a tragic love affair. Left unresolved and dormant for over two decades, it threatens to explode like some forgotten time bomb left ticking in the attic. Can Klein defuse the situation or will it blow up in his face? At its core, Little Easter is a novel about the falls we take and the ways in which we recover…if we recover at all. Join Dylan Klein's forays into the clandestine worlds of the Mafia, New York's Diamond Exchange, and behind the police department's blue wall of silence. Meet the fallen and the tall. Buy The Books Find an independent bookstore through Booksense or Mystery Booksellers, or buy online through Barnes and Noble Amazon | |
 | |
Tower
The James Deans