Coffeetown Press, Author at Coffeetown Press

Jimmy the Stick, by Michael Mayo

Jimmy the Stick, by Michael Mayo Jimmy Quinn was a gunman, bootlegger, and bagman, running with mobsters the likes of Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, until a bullet in the leg and the murder of Arnold Rothstein ended his career. Quinn bought a speakeasy in downtown Manhattan and settled into a…

Ideas of Reference at Jesuit Hall, by Matthew Freeman

Ideas of Reference at Jesuit Hall, by Matthew Freeman The basic conflict in the poems is the poet fighting what is real and what is not real in his brain. We see him going around St Louis struggling to come up with a language that would make sense of his experiences. While somewhat confused, he…

Some Kind of Justice, by Michael Niemann

Some Kind of Justice, by Michael Niemann In the frigid air of Mount Hermon, in pre-civil war Syria, a shivering Valentin Vermeulen interviews Corporal Waldmüller, young guard who has filed a confidential complaint. Vermeulen’s job as UN fraud investigator has sent him to one godforsaken outpost after another ever since he angered his superiors by making accusations he…

Tears of Innocence, by Bill Rapp

Tears of Innocence, by Bill Rapp In the autumn of 1945 Karl Baier, a young American military officer, arrives in a devastated Berlin, the once mighty capital of the Third Reich. His assignment: to hunt down, debrief, and, in some cases, resettle German scientists who helped build the German war machine. He is not alone,…

Hurricane Blues, by Reed Bunzel

Hurricane Blues, by Reed Bunzel Why would anyone want to kill Ruby Rollins in the vestry of her church? A proponent of swift justice, the county sheriff has already locked up her husband for murder, but the state’s governor doesn’t buy it and hires Jack Connor to learn the truth, no matter where it lies.…

Parkinson Pete On Living and Dying with Parkinson’s Disease, by Peter G. Beidler

Parkinson Pete on Living and Dying with Parkinson’s Disease is a direct, honest, and sometimes funny assessment of what it can be like to face a life and a death with a neurodegenerative disease like Parkinson’s. Most of the writers of the books Pete reviewed in Parkinson Pete’s Bookshelves dealt exclusively with the easy early stages of the disease. Then they mumbled…

Absolution, by John A. Vanek

Absolution, by John A. Vanek Father Jack Austin’s alcoholic father suddenly returns to town, decades after deserting him as a young boy. His dad is fleeing a vindictive drug lord and begs him for help. Although Jake detests his old man for abandoning him, he can’t allow him to be murdered, so he enlists the…

No Right Way, by Michael Niemann

No Right Way (240 pages) is book 4 in Michael Niemann’s Valentin Vermeulen Thriller series. “Niemann’s memorable fourth Valentin Vermeulen thriller…blends an unusual locale with an appealing, relatable hero while drawing attention to the plight of refugees. Readers will look forward to Vermeulen’s next assignment.”—Publishers Weekly 4/3/2019 It is the fall of 2015. The refugee…

Miracles, by John A. Vanek

Miracles (270 pages) is the second novel in John Vanek’s Father Jake Austin Mystery series. Father Jake Austin assumes multiple, often seemingly incompatible roles of physician, priest, healer and detective, and with each case, he hopes for miracles. “Vanek brings G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown into the twenty-first century and sprinkles in hints of PBS’s Grantchester. You…

The Sword of Tecumseh, by M.D. Carroll

The Sword of Tecumseh (212 pages) is the first book in M.D. Carroll’s Logan Wells Mystery series. When a professor of history obsessed with finding a sword belonging to the famous Shawnee war chief Tecumseh vanishes from the small community of Prairie Stop, Indiana, Logan Wells must find a connection between events of the distant…