'GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER' NOW OUT IN STORES

About a month or so back, I wrote about my former work colleague Wallace Stroby, who's third novel "Gone 'Til November" is out today in major bookstores. BTW, it's been getting some pretty damn good reviews.

He recently posted an enlightening blog post explaining why there was a five year-lag time between books. In fact, he had started writing a completely different novel altogether and pretty much hit the wall and scrapped it.

He says: The next morning when I woke up, I knew I'd decided to bag the novel, all 188 hard-fought pages of it. And when I came to that realization, I felt a tremendous sense of relief flooding through me. Not long after that, I started working on a short story about one of the characters who would eventually figure in GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER. And suddenly writing was fun again.

To read more check out the post at his blog HERE.

And please, if you're a fan of pulp, noir or gritty crime, give his work a look.

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A WRITER YOU NEED TO KNOW: WALLACE STROBY

Jersey Shore-based crime writer Wallace Stroby, a former newspaper colleague of mine, is about to get "Gone 'Til November," his third book published. Even though the work isn't available until January, I stumbled across a mini review of it on Publishers Weekly and decided to let my basement fans know about this underrated scribe. Seriously... Why his books aren't made into big screen features is still a mystery to me. In any case, check out this killer review:

PW: Gone 'til November Wallace Stroby. Minotaur, $24.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-312-56024-9

Tormented lives brutally intersect in Stroby's powerful thriller, the possible first in a new series to feature Sara Cross, the lone woman sheriff's deputy in Florida's St. Charles County. One night, Cross, a single mother who's coping with her son's leukemia and the remnants of a two-years-gone postdivorce fling with fellow deputy Billy Flynn, arrives on the edge of a cypress swamp where Flynn has just shot a 22-year-old black man from New Jersey allegedly fleeing a traffic stop. Sara tries to smother her still-simmering lust for no-good Billy, but her cop instincts drive her toward a dismaying truth that hurtles her into a violent showdown with an aging New Jersey contract killer stricken with a rare cancer. While relentlessly probing the eternal mystery of why bright and capable women fall for dangerous losers, Stroby (The Heartbreak Lounge) explores moral choices that leave his devastatingly real characters torn between doing nothing and risking everything. (Jan.)

Fans of gritty crime noir will absolutely dig his style and I couldn't suggest more to check him out. The New York Times book review said, "Stroby does wonders with his blue-collar characters" and Gerald Petievich, author of To Live and Die in L.A. said of his debut novel "The Barbed Wire Kiss," that "A new member has been added to the Michael Connelly-Robert Crais-Harlan Coben club of crime fiction. This work marks the debut of a novelist of great promise."

Be sure to also visit his blog, aptly named The Heartbreak Blog (a nod to his second book).

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