Two immortal brothers crisscross the American Southwest to elude a murderous biker gang and protect a young woman in this tautly paced thriller from award-winning author Richard Lange. Summer, 1976. Jesse and his brother, Edgar, are on the road in search of victims. They're rovers, nearly indestructible nocturnal beings who must consume human blood in order to survive. For seventy years they've lurked on the fringes of society, roaming from town to town, dingy motel to dingy motel, stalking the transients, addicts, and prostitutes they feed on. This hard-boiled supernatural hell-ride kicks off when the brothers encounter a young woman who disrupts their grim routine, forcing Jesse to confront his past and plunging his present into deadly chaos as he finds himself scrambling to save her life. The story plays out through the eyes of the brothers, a grieving father searching for his son's murderer, and a violent gang of rover bikers, coming to a...

From an award-winning author, a “lean and gritty, thoughtful and nuanced” neo-noir. Joe Hustle has never had much luck—but things start looking up when he meets an intriguing new woman and scores a rare windfall. Can he outrun disaster long enough to turn things around? (Michael Koryta, author of An Honest Man)   Joe Hustle is a survivor. A Gulf War vet and ex-con always one stumble away from catastrophe, he manages to scrape together enough money from various jobs to eke out a precarious existence on the darker fringes of Los Angeles. When he meets Emily, the black-sheep daughter of a wealthy family, the two spark an instant connection—she seems like the best thing to happen to him in a while.   But their whirlwind romance is put to the test when what starts out as a simple favor for a friend leaves Joe homeless, unemployed, and on the wrong side of a vengeful drug dealer. An...

A woman goes on the run in this intense and cinematic thriller by an award-winning writer.To escape the awful life she has descended into, Luz plans carefully. She takes only the clothes on her back, a Colt .45, and all the money in her husband's safe. The corpses in the hallway weren't part of her plan.Luz needs to find the daughter she left behind years earlier, but she knows she may die trying. Her husband is El Principe, a key player in a high-powered drug cartel, a business he runs with the same violence he has used to keep Luz his perfect, obedient wife.With the pace and relentless force of a Scorsese film, ANGEL BABY is the newest masterpiece from one of the most ambitious and talented crime novelists at work today.Review"When you find yourself rooting for the killer in a grisly crime novel, you know you're in the hands of a real writer. Every character in Richard Lange's Angel Baby feels like flesh and bone, even the ones who show up just to be killed.... The plot explodes after Luz kicks her habit, cleans out her husband's safe, shoots her bodyguards, and heads for the border ....As vividly as the other [character]s are drawn, I'd throw them all under the bus for Jerónimo, the morally conflicted killer who becomes the beating heart of the story.""Angel Baby, a lean novel that leaps and signs with hard-boiled intuition, is Lange's third book, and it's his best work yet.... If *Angel Baby *starts out at a gallop, it pretty quickly settles into a full-on sprint.... Luz is the hero of this story, a queen among highly corruptible pawns.""There are books-like Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men and Nic Pizzolatto's Galveston-that open with a trigger-snap of trouble and blast forward with the propulsive force of a bullet and never stop moving. Angel Baby is one of them....This novel about an escape is the perfect summer escape. Lange has proved his poetic grit with Dead Boys and This Wicked World, but Angel Baby puts him in a new category: crime boss.""Strong and relentless....Beautifully paced, deftly written, Angel Baby is a book about moral compromise, in which we have empathy for everyone (or almost everyone) and no one at once.... As with life, Angel Baby offers a story in which motivations are murky and every act is weighted, and the best we can hope for is that the means will be justified by the results....A book that does so much so well. Angel Baby is taut and vicious, unfurling like a rumba of rattlesnakes.""The story is thrilling and cinematic, told as one long chase scene....Lange inhabits his novel's characters. There's no pure black and white to them, only varying and unexpected shades of gray.... Intense, extreme and definitely grimy and readers will find that's a good thing.""Almost every character in Lange's latest crime novel is made desperate by personal demons, and this struggle creates a fast-paced thrill ride.... A Tarantino-like vortex of mayhem and violence.""This is one lean, tough novel. Lange's prose is sharp throughout and his pacing moves with the momentum of rolling thunder.... No one is good in this superb portrait of wrecked lives, but no one is entirely evil either. Everyone is painfully human and recognizable in his or her suffering....It's a truly great read.""A rising star.... Lange embraces classic noir in all its violence, bleakness, and dark humor. He makes readers care about his flawed characters and appreciate the odds that were stacked against them by the circumstances of their upbringing. A film waiting to happen, this book boasts memorable characters, evocative settings, and a suspenseful plot."About the AuthorRichard Lange is the author of the story collection Dead Boys, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the novel This Wicked World. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2004 and 2011. He lives in Los Angeles. *

Set on the dark side of Los Angeles, the masterful new collection from an award-winning and highly praised "natural-born storyteller" (Ron Rash). In these gripping and intense stories, Richard Lange returns to the form that first landed him on the literary map. These are edge-of-your-seat tales: A prison guard must protect an inmate being tried for heinous crimes. A father and son set out to rescue a young couple trapped during a wildfire. An ex-con trying to make good as a security guard stumbles onto a burglary plot. A young father must submit to blackmail to protect the fragile life he's built. SWEET NOTHING is an unforgettable collection that shows once again why T.C. Boyle wrote, "Lange's stories combine the truth-telling and immediacy of Raymond Carver with the casual hip of Denis Johnson. There is a potent artistic sensibility at work here" (on Dead Boys).**

"Lange's prose is masterful, his sense of pacing unfaltering, and he writes about characters on the cutting edge of life." -William Boyle, Los Angeles Review of Books*Rowan Petty is a conman down on his luck. He's flat broke, living out of cheap hotels, and wondering how it all went wrong. His car quits on him in Reno, and he takes a job there on the bottom rung of a lousy phone scam. When he's not swindling lonely widows, he tries to turn nickels into dimes at the poker table. One snowy night, he crosses paths with a sweet-talking hooker who's tired of the streets, and sparks fly.When an old friend of his turns up spreading a rumor about two million dollars in army money smuggled out of Afghanistan and stashed in an apartment in Los Angeles, it seems like a chance at the score of a lifetime. So Petty and his girl head south, and straight into trouble. A wounded vet, a washed-up actor, and Petty's estranged daughter are all players in the dangerous game...

These hard-hitting, deeply felt stories follow straight arrows and outlaws, have-it-alls and outcasts, as they take stock of their lives and missteps and struggle to rise above their turbulent pasts. A salesman re-examines his tenuous relationship with his sister after she is brutally attacked. A house painter plans a new life for his family as he plots his last bank robbery. A drifter gets a chance at love when he delivers news of a barfly's death to the man's estranged daughter. A dissatisfied yuppie is oddly envious of his ex-con brother as they celebrate their first Christmas together. Set in a Los Angeles depicted with aching clarity, Lange's stories are gritty, and his characters often less than perfect. Beneath their macho bravado, however, they are full of heart and heartbreak.

**Winner of the International Association of Crime Writers' Dashiell Hammett Award**A woman goes on the run in this intense and cinematic thriller by an award-winning writer. To escape the awful life she has descended into, Luz plans carefully. She takes only the clothes on her back, a Colt .45, and all the money in her husband's safe. The corpses in the hallway weren't part of her plan.Luz needs to find the daughter she left behind years earlier, but she knows she may die trying. Her husband is El Principe, a key player in a high-powered drug cartel, a business he runs with the same violence he has used to keep Luz his perfect, obedient wife.With the pace and relentless force of a Scorsese film, ANGEL BABY is the newest masterpiece from one of the most ambitious and talented crime novelists at work today.