Böcker av Jim Fusilli

The album that Brian Wilson created in an attempt to outdo the Beatles' Rubber Soul album. Worshipped by music lovers for its harmonies it is also regarded as an early demonstration of how to use the recording studio as an instrument. Brian Wilson has recently been touring the album again, playing it to thousands of devoted fans.

A crime thriller, coming-of-age story and a family saga, The Price You Pay unravels in mid-1970s Jersey City, a crumbling town where violence and coercion reign. Young Mickey Wright is thrust into a world controlled by a powerful Teamster local associated with the Genovese crime syndicate. The man who puts him in jeopardy: his father, a free-wheeling policeman well-known to Jersey City's politicians and drug dealers. When a Black trucker is murdered, Mickey is forced to choose between loyalty to family and the Teamsters or to values he shares with Debbie Olsen, the love of his young life who is the daughter of a solidly middle-class family. Memorable appearances by Mickey's sister, who is broken by her father's foul will, and memories of their late mother haunt the story. The question of whether Mickey can stand tall, break free and live a worthy life of his choosing isn't answered until a final, shocking confrontation. The Price You Pay is rich with vivid details and the kind of propulsive yet compassion storytelling that defines Fusilli's career as one of today's most admired mystery writers. As in his novels Narrows Gate and The Mayor of Polk Street, he proves once again that he knows how danger can explode when the mob, police and politics are intertwined. As for Mickey and Debbie, there is a way out. Will they survive to take it? Critical Acclaim for The Price You Pay: "Jim Fusilli has done a lot of good writing in his time, but The Price You Pay is his best book. It's everything you want urban crime fiction to be: taut, seriously suspenseful, closely observed, wry, and very knowing about the way the real world works. I started off admiring the precision of the writing, and then found the pages flying. I was going to say George V. Higgins, the author of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, would have liked this novel. But then again, he might have just been pissed that he didn't write it himself." -Peter Blauner, author and screenwriter "With The Price You Pay, Jim Fusilli gives us a tough and heartfelt coming of age crime story-gritty, suspenseful, involving. The characters pop and ache and burn. Mickey Wright is memorable." -Meg Gardiner, #1 New York Times bestselling author Critical Acclaim for Jim Fusilli: "Superior. This courageous and original writer works against the grain of expectations, looking to make our experience not easy but illuminative and true." -Boston Globe "Fusilli writes with poetic intensity." -Kirkus Reviews "Fusilli's a master of his craft, each line brimming with his sense of urban life and nail-biting suspense... His prose is diamond-bright and conjures up a realm you cannot forget." -Providence Journal

One of popular music's most prolific and creative composers, Elvis Costello has written songs in every conceivable genre: pop, reggae, rock, country, funk, soul and jazz, but also for full orchestras and string quartets. What you may not have noticed is that a surprising number of these songs are crime stories-not mere nods toward unsavory events featuring questionable characters, but complete tales of murder and violence told in verse. Costello's song titles alone confirm one of his preferred themes: "Accidents will Happen," "American Gangster Time," "Bullets for the Newborn King," "Coal-Train Robberies," "The Final Mrs. Curtain," "Hetty O'Hara Confidential," "Kinder Murder," "My Thief," "Shabby Doll," "Shot with His Own Gun," "That's How You Got Killed Before" and "Watching the Detectives," among them. His album titles include "Blood & Chocolate," "Brutal Youth," "National Ransom" and "When I Was Cruel." You can just imagine the so-called pulp mysteries of the 1920s, '30s and '40s bearing identical titles accompanied by lurid, evocative cover art. In Brutal & Strange, contemporary masters of crime fiction dig into Costello's catalogue for inspiration. The marriage of Costello's themes and these award-winning authors' creativity will seem an inevitable match when you experience the results. Whether it's Meg Gardiner and "Complicated Shadows," Catriona McPherson and "Tramp the Dirt Down," Alex Segura and "I Want You", Mark Billingham and "Our Little Angels" or many other virtuoso interpretations, the stories match the composer's high standards and suggest there's even more stirring beneath the surface of his songs. In his "Everyday I Write the Book"-explored here by Gar Anthony Hayward-Costello portrays an author as sinister, controlling and vengeful. That's not to say the authors who contributed to Brutal & Strange are anything of the kind. But you will find their questionable characters engaged in unsavory events. One imagines Costello himself would approve.