SUITCASE CHARLIE -- A HANK & MARVIN MYSTERY

I'm happy to report that a new edition of Suitcase Charlie has come out, and it's now being published by Kasva Press, one of the best new publishers around.

The expanded new edition has been receiving great reviews from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Jewish Book Council.

My favorite review I think was the one in the WSJ because it talked about the "lyrical anxiety."  I think it's the perfect way to describe my writing.

Here's the review -- links to where you can read the other reviews and buy the book (Amazon) follow.

Thanks for reading and have a great holiday.

"Suitcase Charlie” (Kasva, 321 pages, $14.95), a tough-as-rusty-nails police procedural by John Guzlowski, is set in Chicago in the spring of 1956—when the radio is playing hits by Frank Sinatra and Chuck Berry, many citizens are smoking Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes, and “Dragnet” and “General Electric Theater” are TV favorites. In Mr. Guzlowski’s book, the “second city” is being terrorized by a series of child killings in which the small victims are drained of blood, dismembered and stuffed into luggage left in public spaces. 

Among those investigating these crimes is police detective Hank Purcell, a World War II veteran who takes his job to heart to an extreme degree: “He was the great remembering machine for all the fear and horror in the city of Chicago.” Purcell, with his heavy-drinking partner, Marvin Bondarowicz, scours the city in search of clues. 

The duo visit the musty apartment of a reclusive language tutor, the elegant suite of a physicist in the employ of the U.S. government, and the shadowy ghetto lair of a brutal young hoodlum. Each environment seems spookier than the last in a narrative driven by lyrical anxiety. 

Little by little, Purcell—treading the blurred line between burnout and breakdown—perceives these sickening new crimes as the fruit of diseased notions and lingering hatreds from earlier decades and even centuries. “I thought all of that bad s—would just disappear when the war ended,” Purcell tells his wife. “And it didn’t. It’s still here.”

______________

Suitcase Charlie page at Amazon: Just click here.

New York Times Review: Just click here.

Jewish Book Council Review: Just click here.

Kirkus. Just click here.

Publishers Weekly.  Just click here.

CrimeSquad. Just click here