February 27, 2010
A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison
by R. Dwayne Betts
Avery Trade
Available 05/04/10 in Paperback
A unique prison narrative that testifies to the power of books to transform a young man’s life
At the age of sixteen, R. Dwayne Betts-a good student from a lower- middle-class family-carjacked a man with a friend. He had never held a gun before, but within a matter of minutes he had committed six felonies. In Virginia, carjacking is a “certifiable” offense, meaning that Betts would be treated as an adult under state law. A bright young kid, he served his nine-year sentence as part of the adult population in some of the worst prisons in the state. A Question of Freedom chronicles Betts’s years in prison, reflecting back on his crime and looking ahead to how his experiences and the books he discovered while incarcerated would define him. Utterly alone, Betts confronts profound questions about violence, freedom, crime, race, and the justice system. Confined by cinder-block walls and barbed wire, he discovers the power of language through books, poetry, and his own pen. Above all, A Question of Freedom is about a quest for identity-one that guarantees Betts’s survival in a hostile environment and that incorporates an understanding of how his own past led to the moment of his crime.
January 10, 2009
The Hands of Love
by Omar Scott
Available 12/24/08
Lorenzo Love, or Ren as he’s known on the streets, is not your typical veteran detective. He’s a smooth-talking, streetwise brother who is quite cunning. He cleverly juggles his home life, which includes his young son and loving wife, a needy mistress, and a narcotics unit of dirty cops that have been taking money under the table from dangerous drug-dealers. Ren has always been crafty at maneuvering his way out of difficult situations. But now his “bad-boy” ways are finally catching up with him. His relationship with his mistress is unraveling, Internal Affairs is investigating his crew for an illegal shooting, and a string of young ladies are brutally murdered one by one with the evidence pointing directly at Ren. The race is on to cover his tracks, clear his crew, and find a serial killer before it’s too late. Can Ren slip out of another tight squeeze, or will he finally go down? The Hands of Love is a fast paced well-crafted novel weaving its way through the crime infested streets of East Dallas. This intense thriller will have your eyes glued to every page right up to the unbelievable ending.
August 26, 2008
[/caption]
T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E.
by Sanyika Shakur
Available August 2008
The follow-up to his best-selling memoir Monster, Sanyika Shakur’s T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E. is a vicious, heartwrenching, and true-to-life novel about an L.A. gang member that masterfully captures the violence and depravity of gang life.
Published fourteen years ago, Sanyika Shakur’s classic memoir of gang life, Monster, was a best seller with nearly 400,000 copies in print in the United States alone. With T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E., his fiction debut, Shakur has delivered a novel that describes, in the same remarkable detail he employed in Monster, the life of an L.A. gang member, and the violent, consuming, and lavish life of the gangster world.
Shakur’s protagonist is Lapeace, the leader of the Eight Tray Crips gang in South Central Los Angeles. He holds no prisoners on the Compton streets riddled with rivalrous gangs looking for blood. In a deadly gunfight with Anyhow, a Blood and Lapeace’s rival since childhood, eight innocent civilians are killed. Anyhow is captured. Lapeace becomes a fugitive and he must hide out in the home of his girlfriend, Tashima, a hip-hop mogul, as a pair of crooked Los Angeles detectives, John Sweeney and Jesse Mendoza, attempt to track him down. The novel explores Sweeney and Mendoza’s maneuvering of the intricate gang network, the detectives employing informants on both sides of the fight to get at the secluded Lapeace, but even more successfully it explores the psychology of the gang member—and in particular Lapeace’s attempts to uncover his roots and somehow disentangle himself from his violent past.
This novel, like the autobiography before it, was written from the confines of Shakur’s jail cell, and the authenticity of its street scenes—the relentlessness of violence, the do-or-die attitude of each side of the gang war, the sheer joy in the killing—is a testament to the hell that has been a majority of Shakur’s life. He was christened a gang member at the age of eleven and has spent most of his life either running from the law or in jail. With Monster, Shakur announced to the world a side of himself not seen before; with T.H.U.G. L.I.F.E., he follows up with an equally compelling story about the terror of gang life and one man’s attempt to free himself.
July 29, 2008
High Rollers #1-4
Written by Gary Phillips
Drawn by Sergio Martín Carrera
Available in July 2008
Chronicling the life of Cameron Quinn, a ruthless upstart out to make a name for himself in this tale of crime and destiny from critically acclaimed mystery novelist Gary Phillips (HIGH HAND, BANGERS)! Phillips shines a harsh light on the action and drama of the L.A. underworld with this inner-city spin on The Sopranos! A potent mix of American Gangster and THE WIRE, for fans of Brubaker’s CRIMINAL!
June 14, 2008
Murder on the Down Low
By Pamela Samuels Young
Release Date: September 1, 2008
ISBN 978-0-9815627-0-4
“Murder on the Down Low is an entertaining read, filled with heart-pumping suspense. Pamela Samuels-Young weaves a sitting-on-the-edge of your seat plot that keeps you guessing and turning the pages!” – Best-selling Author Victoria Christopher Murray.
Infidelity can be deadly! A brazen gunman is targeting prominent African-American men on the streets of L.A. The victims are all quintessential family men. Well-educated. Attractive. Successful. But appearances can be deceiving. When the baffling murders are linked to a high-profile lawsuit, a tenacious female detective soon exposes a scandalous tale of lust, lies and vengeance. Read an excerpt at www.pamelasamuelsyoung.com.
Watch the book trailer for Murder on the Down Low
Hear an audio version of the first chapter of Murder on the Down Low
About the Author
Compton native Pamela Samuels Young is a practicing attorney and author of the thrillers, Murder on the Down Low, as well as the Essence bestsellers, Every Reasonable Doubt and In Firm Pursuit. A desire to see engaging African-American and female attorneys depicted in today’s legal fiction prompted the former journalist to begin writing despite a busy legal career. Every Reasonable Doubt won the Black Expressions Book Club’s Fiction Writing Contest and In Firm Pursuit was nominated for Best African-American Novel of 2007 by Romantic Times Book Reviews. Visit Pamela’s website at www.pamelasamuelsyoung.com.
June 6, 2008
Politics Noir: Dark Tales from the Corridors of Power (Paperback)
edited by Gary Phillips
From authors including National Book Award winner Pete Hautman, Deadly Ink 2007 winner Darrell James, and renowned social commentator turned short-story writer Mike Davis, a chilling and subversive collection of new crime stories with stark themes of greed, corruption and insatiable ambition in the very highest places.
With stories by:
• Ken Bruen
• Mike Davis
• Robert Greer
• Pete Hautman
• Darrell James
• Jake Lamar
• Michele Matinez
• Twist Phelan
• John Shannon
• Ken Wishnia
• and others
June 2, 2008
Hello Folks!
Just came back from the Leimert Park Book Festival. It was a wonderful sunny, soulful event. I met many great writers and saw the famous Nikki Giovanni read. What a treat! Today I am off to BEA at the convention center in LA. Visit me at www.pamwardwriter.com and see my new book BAD GIRLS BURN SLOW a vicious, lower the casket, cat and mouse dance. And for those who have not gotten my first book yet, WANT SOME GET SOME is a heart attack in print. Filled with car chases, bank robbery and good ol’ boxing-match sex. It is everything LA and then some.
ENJOY!
PAM WARD
Publisher: Dafina (March 1, 2007)
Trudy, a.k.a. “Trudy with the Booty,” knows what she wants and how to get it. But a better life far away from the jacked-up streets of South Central L.A. needs to be financed, and she can’t think about leaving without handing some sweet payback to Lil’ Steve, her slick talking ex. Ever since he started selling nude videos of her to the neighborhood men, Trudy can barely walk the streets. His demise would be the icing on the cake. But Trudy’s plan to get even and escape the ghetto is more than risky–it may be the worst mistake of her life. Having recruited a crew of hustlers, car-jackers, and homewreckers who hang out at the seedy nightclub, Dee’s Parlor, where she sings nights after working days as a bank teller, Trudy is ready to put her scheme into action–a heist that can make them all rich. There’s just one problem: Jimmy, a stone-cold killer who doesn’t like being ripped off. And while the best laid plans often do go awry, no one could have guessed where this wild, crazy ride takes this cast of bumbling lawbreakers and heartbreakers as they scramble over and under each other to get what they want.
A fast-paced, exhilarating drama with sharply drawn characters, sultry writing, and a fierce intensity of emotion, Want Some, Get Some is a brilliantly assured debut. A promising new talent, Pam Ward brings a woman’s sense of bravado to a boy’s game.
