COVER REVEAL …
Coming in March 2018 from Down & Out Books…BITTER WATER BLUES by Patrick Shawn Bagley.
Synopsis … Joe Collins used to be Joey Connolly, alias Joey Kotex, an infamous enforcer for the Petucci crime family. He left that world behind to run a blues club in Chicago, but Carl Petucci finds Joe and forces him to do one last job.
Joe’s assignment takes him to Wesserunsett, a small Maine town that has seen better days. With a friend’s life at stake, Joe must kill a porn director and recover a video starring Petucci’s niece. Easier said than done, as the target’s girlfriend, Wanda, is a Wesserunsett cop. Then there’s Hag, a wannabe hitman, and his buddy Earl. Hag’s looking to make a killing in the killing business.
As Joey, Wanda, and Hag each pursue their own agenda, they move ever closer to a bloody showdown.
Praise for BITTER WATER BLUES …
“A glorious boilermaker of noir and East Coast gothic. The action is as taut as a sprung snare and Bagley tightens the screws with every page.” —Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase
“Bagley sandblasts the chipped veneer of small-town charm to expose the rot beneath. Bitter Water Blues is a vivid, unflinching portrait of desperate people struggling at the margins of society to survive.” —Chris F. Holm, author of The Collector trilogy and The Killing Kind
“Bagley’s debut novel is pitch perfect crime fiction, as dark and raw as it gets with a rich tapestry of intersecting characters who bring a beleaguered blue collar New England community to life with the style and powerful punch of a seasoned veteran… highly recommended.” —Ed Kurtz, author of Nothing You Can Do
Meet the Author … Patrick Shawn Bagley’s stories of rural mayhem have appeared in Crimespree, The Iconoclast, Thrilling Detective, Great Jones Street, and Spinetingler Magazine, as well as the Bleak House Books anthology Uncage Me. He was one of the founding editors of The Lineup: Poems on Crime. Bagley lives on a dead-end dirt road in a one-stoplight central Maine town, where he is writing a horror novel and a sequel to Bitter Water Blues. During the day, he works a community supports program for adults with intellectual disabilities.