<div><b>To keep his practice alive, a desperate lawyer takes a case defending a battered wife</b><BR>Just seven years after he left law school, Sid Kaplan was one of New York&rsquo;s top defense attorneys. With a glittering style and a hunger for competition, he was as fierce as they come. He was the go-to lawyer for Manhattan&rsquo;s toughest, flashiest criminals&mdash;until his mother&rsquo;s death wrecked his confidence. Suddenly, the only way to sustain his sixteen-hour days was a ceaseless stream of cocaine and scotch, a combination that ruined his life&rsquo;s work in a matter of months. His only remaining employees are Caleb and Julia&mdash;a pair of ex-clients who don&rsquo;t mind working for irregular pay. Sid&rsquo;s latest bum case is Priscilla Sweet, a drug addict with priors, violent tendencies, and a dead husband whom she may or may not have killed in self-defense. She also has dangerous friends, which means that defending Prissy will make Sid famous again&mdash;either on the front page, or in the obituaries. </div>

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Bad Lawyer

<div><b>Two cops hunt a serial killer, and a young blind woman fights to stay alive</b><BR>Crossing Flatbush Avenue is never easy, and for Lorraine Cho, it&rsquo;s the most dangerous part of her day. Her job as a medical report transcriber is on the other side of Flatbush&mdash;and Lorraine was blinded in an accident several years ago. She is waiting to cross one evening when a stranger offers to help. Just before they reach the safety of the sidewalk, Lorraine&rsquo;s benefactor shoves her into the back of a van and speeds away. Across town at police headquarters, Roland Means toils in purgatory. A street cop with a violent streak, he&rsquo;s on ice in the ballistics lab, waiting while the New York Police Department tries to decide whether he&rsquo;s a psychopath or a thug. Lucky for him, a serial killer has been terrorizing New York, and Captain Vanessa Bouton needs a tough detective. Bouton wants evidence to prove a cover-up theory, and Means is willing to be cannon fodder just to get back on the street. Though neither of them knows it, Lorraine Cho&rsquo;s life is in their hands.</div>

Kobo

A Good Day to Die

<div><b>A psychopath is loose in Brooklyn, and it will take a half-mad cop to catch him</b><BR>A gang of small-time dealers camps out underneath the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge, slipping hits to passing addicts in exchange for ten bucks a pop. It&rsquo;s blistering hot, and they drink beer to stay cool, sharing a six-pack with a couple of local girls. As the night winds down, a massive black man appears in a coat that&rsquo;s too heavy for the weather, produces a shotgun, and starts to fire. Among the dead are two supposed customers&mdash;an undercover cop and a reporter whom the city will avenge by opening a new front in the war on drugs. The gunman, a full-time crack addict with a boxer&rsquo;s build and a bulldog&rsquo;s temper, disappears into the wilds of Brooklyn. To roust him, Stanley Moodrow will rain hell on the borough, breaking in a new partner as he attempts to smoke out the wild man with a shotgun.</div>

Force of Nature

<div><b>Now a PI, Moodrow takes on a pair of crooked real estate developers in Queens</b><BR>Jackson Heights is a quiet neighborhood made up of immigrants, families, and young professionals looking to escape sky-high Manhattan rents. For Marek Najowski, the neighborhood is an easy target. A slumlord with dreams of becoming a player, he teams up with Irish drug kingpin Marty Blanks to buy three sleepy apartment buildings and, using intimidation and violence, drive out the rent-controlled tenants. The potential profits are limitless. But they haven&rsquo;t counted on Stanley Moodrow. Once the toughest cop in the New York Police Department, Moodrow has not mellowed since he took his business private. When he gets a whiff of the Jackson Heights scheme, he sees an opportunity to showcase his particular talents. As Marek and Marty will learn, criminals aren&rsquo;t the only ones who know how to hurt people.</div>

Forced Entry

<div><b>In 1957, a young cop boxes his way to a gold shield, and finds corruption everywhere he turns</b><BR>Before he became one of the most feared detectives in the New York Police Department, Stanley Moodrow was a boxer. A big kid with sledgehammer fists and a body that didn&rsquo;t know when to quit, he won his first twenty bouts handily, and might have gone pro if he saw a future in it. But the men in Moodrow&rsquo;s family have always been cops, and he wanted to join their ranks. As a young recruit, Moodrow knows that the pain he has suffered in the ring puts him a step ahead of the fresh-faced youngsters around him. Using his boxing talent as a way to get the attention of the brass, he wins his detective&rsquo;s badge in record time. But when he starts life among the elite, he learns that there is nothing in the department that can&rsquo;t be bought. Even the blood of the innocents has a price tag.</div>

A Piece of the Action

<div><b>A psychotic killer released from jail begins a spree that only Moodrow can stop</b><BR>Even Jilly Sappone knows they should never have let him out. Ever since a bullet fragment embedded itself in his brain, he has been prone to uncontrollable rages. Opiates help dull his anger, but only blood can make it go away. When the parole board makes the mistake of freeing him, Jilly knows it&rsquo;s only a matter of time before he goes back behind bars. Until then, he plans on having some fun. He starts by visiting his ex-wife, and leaving with his four-year-old daughter. The police have no hope of getting the girl back alive, so the mother turns to Stanley Moodrow, an ex-cop turned private investigator whose bulky frame conceals a fury that can nearly match the kidnapper&rsquo;s. With the help of his new partner, Ginny Gadd, Moodrow will do what no prison ever could: break Jilly Sappone.</div>

Damaged Goods

<div><b>A hard-nosed cop tears into the criminal shadow world of the Lower East Side</b><BR>On the streets of downtown Manhattan, there is no better disguise than the vacant stare and limp slouch of the junkie. Masquerading as an addict, Johnny Katanos goes undetected as he slithers up the fire escape towards the biggest heroin operation in the city of New York. He disables the alarms, distracts the guards, kills the Dobermans, and is waiting with a grenade when Ronald Jefferson Chadwick, drug kingpin, returns with a suitcase full of cash. A few minutes later, the money is gone, Chadwick is dead, and the factory has been reduced to a fireball. Though the New York Police Department rarely investigates a dealer&rsquo;s death, a Russian-made grenade appearing downtown is cause for fear. The case falls to Stanley Moodrow, a beefy detective who knows that in an investigation like this, there&rsquo;s no time to go by the book. </div>

A Twist of the Knife

<div><b>A mysterious cult is pushing a designer drug, and only Moodrow can shut the deadly organization down</b><BR>Though they preach love and understanding, the people of Hanover House also know a thing or two about strong-arm tactics. When an errant member of the Canal Street cult plans to write a tell-all book exposing Davis Craddock&rsquo;s pseudo-religion as a sham, the Hanoverians react calmly. One of the cult&rsquo;s members, Flo Alamare, is dispatched to let the would-be author know that he&rsquo;s welcome to write whatever he likes&mdash;so long as he doesn&rsquo;t care whether his daughter lives or dies. Soon Flo is found dumped in an empty lot in the Bronx. She&rsquo;s barely alive, having apparently suffered a stroke or seizure&mdash;and the doctors don&rsquo;t realize that she overdosed on a powerful drug of Craddock&rsquo;s own design. She&rsquo;s returned to her parents, who had been desperately searching for her. The tough-minded Alamares want revenge, and hire bruising PI Stanley Moodrow to catch Craddock and break his cult wide open.<BR></div>

Bad to the Bone

<div><b>A broke PI attempts to prove the innocence of a wrongly convicted homeless man</b><BR>Late at night by posh Gramercy Park, a woman peers into the backseat of a parked car. She&rsquo;s never seen a dead body before, but there&rsquo;s enough blood that she has no doubt what she&rsquo;s looking at. She remembers seeing a strange man nearby, and the police use her fuzzy identification and a few other bits of tenuous evidence to finger Billy Sowell, an alcoholic bum with limited intelligence and a patchy memory, as the killer. Who cares if he&rsquo;s guilty? Billy&rsquo;s an easy conviction, and his case is forgotten until years later, when it falls in the lap of PI Marty Blake.  Blake will take anything as he tries to rebuild his practice after a year&rsquo;s suspension for illegal surveillance, and he attempts to clear Billy&rsquo;s name using his expertise at computerized investigation. But when it comes to proving the New York Police Department wrong, virtual sleuthing will not be enough. For this computer expert, it&rsquo;s time to play tough.</div>

Last Chance for Glory

<div><b>A repeat offender freshly sprung from prison tries to do the impossible: Stay out trouble</b><BR>Peter Frangello hasn&rsquo;t spent three straight years out of jail since he was sixteen. Now past thirty, he&rsquo;s nearing parole when his prison block neighbor is burned alive in his cell, a vicious attack that was intended for Frangello himself. He spends his last week in protective custody, and when he is released back into the world he makes a resolution to stay clean&mdash;not for morality&rsquo;s sake, but because if he goes back inside, the next hit won&rsquo;t miss. But for a man whose only skills are stealing and doing time, staying out of trouble is not easy. As old associates and an army of crooked cops put pressure on him, Frangello will find that, inside or out, he&rsquo;s doomed to remain a prisoner for life.</div>

Keeplock

<div><B>A truck hijacking on a New York street goes badly awry in this new novel from an author who writes &ldquo;</B><B>top-notch hard-boiled crime fiction&rdquo; (<I>Booklist</I>).</B><BR />  <BR /> It was a sure thing. A truck with a thousand cartons of cigarettes, at a wholesale price of sixty dollars each. Mike Tedesco had thought through the foolproof plan for the early-morning hijacking. The only tricky part was disabling the GPS system that enabled the owner to track the truck and its valuable contents. He brought along the expert who swore he could do it in three minutes. He couldn&rsquo;t, so Tedesco shot him dead in the middle of the rainy street in uptown Manhattan before fleeing the scene.<BR />  <BR /> NYPD Detective Dante Cepeda is called in and quickly decides he can solve this one&mdash;his great joy&mdash;as he explains to the attractive redheaded sergeant who works the case with him. The hunt leads Cepeda to a Russian mafioso, Tedesco&rsquo;s gorgeous girlfriend,  a curse that needs a blood sacrifice, and a scarred pit bull who&rsquo;s survived a life of dogfights. A gritty tale of greed and casual violence, the latest crime novel from the Hammett Prize nominee is realistic, shocking, and relentlessly compelling.<BR />  <BR /> &ldquo;Solomita knows his city and his people, and he writes with both muscle and sensitivity.&rdquo; &mdash;<I>Los Angeles Times</I><BR />  <BR /> &ldquo;A keen observer of humanity.&rdquo; &mdash;<I>Publishers Weekly</I><BR />  <BR /> &ldquo;A master at capturing on paper the flavor of streetwise cops and robbers and their victims.&rdquo; &mdash;<I>Library Journal</I><BR />  <BR /> &ldquo;Solomita has Elmore Leonard&rsquo;s flair for letting you view the world through his character&rsquo;s eyes, no matter how narrow or how bloodshot.&rdquo; &mdash;<I>The New York Times</I></div>

The Wrong Side of the Grass

<div><B>The NYPD hides a killer within the ranks in this &ldquo;dark, satisfying&rdquo; hard-boiled noir thriller (<I>Publishers Weekly</I>).</B><BR />  <BR /> Detective Boots Littlewood of Brooklyn&rsquo;s Sixty-Fourth Precinct has been assigned an investigation that&rsquo;s hitting close to home: the murder of his police captain. It&rsquo;s been called another tragic cop killing. Boots suspects something closer to an organized hit&mdash;and he knows in his gut that the perp in custody is an innocent man. Boots&rsquo;s new partner, &ldquo;Crazy&rdquo; Jill Kelly, is taking it personally, too. The daughter of a murdered officer, she&rsquo;s got a quick temper, a vengeful streak, and perfect aim.<BR />  <BR /> Once Boots and Jill hit the streets, they uncover more than dirty secrets. The investigation reaches back a decade to the sordid serial crimes of the Lipstick Killer&mdash;and ahead to a cesspool of corruption and conspiracy that taints the badges of New York&rsquo;s finest. But as Boots and Jill prepare for hunting season, they realize that they themselves are being hunted.</div>

Stephen Solomita
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Books By Stephen Solomita (12 Books)