A Portrait of the Private Investigator as a Young Man

Reed Farrel Coleman’s Moe Prager mystery titles have been nominated for and won most of the awards given to crime fiction. Onion Street, the eighth installment in the series, finds a much younger Moe in college investigating the brutal beating of his girlfriend. From there, things spiral into graver dangers for people in Moe’s life.

“The twists and turns are unpredictable, but Coleman pulls everything together by the end.” -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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graphic /’grafik/ : giving a vivid picture with explicit details or rocks having a surface texture resembling cuneiform writing

Tenaya has never left the Valley. He was born in a car by the Merced River, and grew up in a hidden camp with his parents, surviving on fish, acorns, and unfinished food thrown away by the park’s millions of tourists. But despite its splendor, Tenaya’s Yosemite is a visceral place of opposites, at once beautiful, dangerous, and violent. When he meets Lucy, a young woman from the south side of the park, Tenaya must choose between this new relationship and the Valley, terrorism and legend, the sacred versus the material.

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A Man, the Dog, an RV starting out across America

Driven by tragedy to turn his back on human society, the Dog is on a quest to fish himself into oblivion. And he’s nearly made it. Playing the back highways of America in a wounded old RV . . . provisioned with a supply of peanut butter sandwiches, bad cigars, and vodka-Tang . . . armed with a loaded pistol (for when the money runs out) . . . the Dog is nearly at the end of his tether when he rolls into little Black Earth, Wisconsin, intending to fish the yellow sally stonefly hatch . . . and finds a body instead.

“Galligan portrays the radiantly quirky characters with deft strokes, pulling their strings with panache and outlining their world with humor and acceptance. A real treat.” -Library Journal

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