When UC San Diego professor Marcus George discovers a colleague’s body in his office, he immediately falls under suspicion. But his partner of nearly twenty years, defense attorney Bob Abramson, faces his own personal grief, leading the couple to navigate love, loyalty, and resilience under pressure.

Writes Anne Brown from NYTrendNYC:

“In most mysteries, the tension revolves around the central question: whodunnit? In H.N. Hirsch’s latest book, Winter, the suspense runs deeper. While a campus murder sets the stage, the true intrigue lies in whether a decades-long relationship can endure grief, professional pressures, and the relentless passage of time.”

On his own, with his favorite cousin by his side, the new two-member “gang” devises a takedown of the city’s most infamous biker gang’s clubhouse for a possible huge payday.

The stakes are high—and so is the tension—as Vinnie bets his life on being smarter than the gang, the cops, and his father, the would-be don. And you’re going to love these guys. And tense up. And laugh, and then laugh some more.

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Fault Line is the second in H. N. Hirsch’s Bob & Marcus Mystery series.

In the second of the Bob & Marcus Mystery series, newly minted 25-year-old lawyer Bob Abramson joins the DA’s office in San Diego. He soon finds himself leading an investigation into the politically charged murder of the mayor’s husband, a wealthy developer with far too many secrets for his wife’s political ambitions.

Bob’s first encounter with murder occurred four years previously, when his roommate, the scion of an old Boston family, was murdered and the case was investigated by the victim’s Harvard professor, Marcus George. As the investigation developed, Bob and Marcus, naturally, fell in love.

Now, Bob has completed law school and landed a job as an Assistant District Attorney in San Diego, and Marcus has accepted a new position at UC San Diego. As they settle in to their new home, they’re thrust into the investigation and its political ramifications, and they find that a gay subculture roils much of southern California’s placidly straight surface.

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Gideon Calhoun is a televangelist who for years has claimed to be “God’s agent here on earth.” When Jerome’s insurance company rejects his claim because the sinkhole was “an act of God,” Jerome—an atheist—decides to sue his agent for damages.

Now the atheist must prove the existence of God to claim recompense, while the evangelist must argue that he is not God’s agent, because God may not even exist! Jerome v. God is an ironic, humanist novel of the two men’s epic battle.

Jeff’s previous novel, Perpetuonics, was released by Pisgah Press in 2024. He is also the author of the acclaimed Denton the Dragon musical play and story. He lives in Black Mountain, NC.

These “Digital beINGS”— Dings in shorthand — can theoretically “live” forever. They reside in massive servers, where they communicate with living people with the help of a living Compadore. They are also, of course, subject to rules and restrictions . . . until they begin to discover their own power.

From the evolution of the concept into reality to the devolution and, ultimately, revolution, Perpetuonics  presents an intriguing, disturbing possibility for the future of life on earth.

Written by Jeffrey Melvin Hutchins, Perpetuonics was released Oct. 17, 2024. He is also the author of the acclaimed Denton the Dragon musical play and story. He lives in Black Mountain, NC.

RF Wilson’s Rick Ryder Mystery series exposes the dark, gritty underside of life. Set in Asheville and the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains that Wilson calls home, one-armed attorney and sometime private investigator Rick Ryder struggles to balance a challenging job, personal demons, and a loving but difficult marriage.

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Its protagonist is a young, gay Harvard faculty member striving to find his footing in the Ivy League in the face of the publish-or-perish standards of academia, the strictures of life in exclusive enclaves in Boston and Kennebunkport, and the gay subculture along the New England coast circa 1985.

Here Professor Marcus George, already beset by the tense, competitive world of Ivy League politics, is drawn into investigating the murder of one of his former students, the son of an elite Massachusetts family. As he investigates the murder, Marcus stumbles across academic and financial corruption that could ruin several lives—even as he falls into a tender and heartwarming love affair that will change his own.

Shade is a beautifully realized, gripping tale in the classic style of an endlessly surprising, twist-and-turn murder mystery. Imagine a book like Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night set in Harvard Yard, Boston’s elite Louisburg Square, and Miller’s Cove, a fictional Maine coastal resort reminiscent of the famous Ogunquit.

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A preacher held at knifepoint in a stranger’s cabin, another who absconds with his church’s funds and the wife of a parishioner; an elderly woman who slowly goes mad as she freezes to death; a renowned fiddler who returns home to die of AIDS; a gravedigger more comfortable with the dead than the living …

Sinful or righteous, imbued with hope or beyond redemption, each of these memorable characters struggles to endure, survive, or triumph over unplanned encounters with the people, forgotten or remembered, admired or scorned, who beset their lives.

These narrative threads are masterfully woven into the tapestry that is A Twilight Reel — a book full of surprises, dark fears, and unexpected humor, that echoes and distills the travails of any people, in any place.

Feathered Quill WINNER 2022

This new collection has been called “pure Joycean,” a “symphonic, nuanced portrayal of our contemporary Southern Highlands,” and “an extraordinary collection from an extraordinary writer.”

Its twelve interrelated tales are set over the course of a year—1999, as Y2K approaches and the world of Runion faces its own tumultuous changes. Like Thomas Wolfe’s Altamont, Runion stands in for places Cody grew up in and knows as only a native son can. Here he presents a vivid portrait of a community in an age of rapid change, learning how to understand and embrace the new despite the frequent pain and fear of the transition.

The stories

In the opening tale, a local preacher is taken captive by a fallen predecessor and struggles to escape before his own sins bring him down as well. As the winter progresses, an elderly woman inches closer to madness, and murder, as the freezing cold brings her inexorably closer to death.

In other stories, a music professor worries about his new life if he and his lover are the only gay men in a rural college town; and neighbors watch with trepidation as a failed church is prepared for a new, unsettling role—as a mosque for the area’s small but growing Islamic community.

Over the summer, a conservative local business owner faces the revelations that his own son, a young musician who left long before, is gay and HIV-positive—and has come home at last, but only to die. Months later, after vigilantes have burned him in effigy, the young fiddler uses his last burst of energy to give an impromptu farewell performance at the local drive-in theater—which, like him, is facing its imminent demise.

The autumn sees a widower rekindles dreams he once had of Marilyn Monroe, and a portrait of small-town death and birth emerges through visions of the dead that relentlessly visit a simple-minded gravedigger. Finally, as the year comes to an end and her last shift ends, a university custodian contemplates abandoning her husband and her small-town life in favor of stepping out into a world anxious with Y2K fears.

It’s no wonder that Robert Morgan (Chasing the North Star) says that “Cody’s is one of the most authentic and inspired voices in contemporary Appalachian fiction” who “speaks for both the region and the world beyond.” Or that Linda Parsons (Candescent) calls him “the masterful caller of the reel, leading us into mystery, time, a little magic realism, and possibly redemption—ever mindful of the living and the dead.”

And what greater praise can a writer achieve than these words from fellow Appalachian writer Leah Hampton:

What wonderful stories these are, rooted in mountains I know so well! Cody blends traditional and modern elements, wry humor, spooky darkness, and his intimate knowledge of the region to bring us a deftly rendered Appalachian story cycle…. This is a real gem.

A Twilight Reel is available now through bookstores everywhere, or through online retailers.

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Earlier in his life, Loewer himself worked as the editor of a small-town newspaper, and he drew on his experiences there to create the novel.

As the publishing trade begins its transition from traditional cold-type to electronic publishing, The Last of the Swindlers captures the magic of story-gathering and small-town politics as it evolves into tracking down a double murderer, a smuggling ring, and fraud. The protagonist, Oliver Swindler, risks his own life and that of his new-found girlfriend and coworker, Adrian Knapp, to solve the many layers of mystery that beset Fernglade, NC.

The novel also previews, in an unexpected way, the current phenomenon of wealthy big-city residents’ flight to smaller, less urbanized areas of the country. Although today’s migration is to escape the Covid-19 pandemic, the book paints a wry picture of self-indulgent rich people’s search for an “undiscovered paradise” (with, of course, all the comforts of the metropolis).

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