Fall Guy

In this taut psychological thriller, a couple and their houseguest find themselves caught in a deadly web of secrets, obsession, and revenge. It is summer, 2012. Charlie, a wealthy banker with an uneasy conscience, invites his troubled cousin Matthew to visit him and his wife in their idyllic mountaintop house. As the days grow hotter, the friendship between the three begins to reveal its fault lines, and with the arrival of a fourth character, the household finds itself suddenly in the grip of uncontrollable passions. As readers of James Lasdun’s acclaimed fiction can expect, The Fall Guy is a complex moral tale as well as a gripping suspense story, probing questions of guilt and betrayal with ruthless incisiveness. Who is the real victim here? Who is the perpetrator? And who, ultimately, is the fall guy? Darkly vivid, with an atmosphere of erotic danger, The Fall Guy is Lasdun’s most entertaining novel yet.

For most people, to know Milton Ryce is to loathe him. Now in his mid-forties, the practical joker has never outgrown the adolescent behavior that amused him so much as a teenager. Embarrassing others has been his favorite past time, and he delights in coming up with elaborate schemes for setting up his “friends” as fall guys. Extremely generous with his money, Milton has bought influence in high places and a circle of well-connected friends and business acquaintances. When he plunges to his death while sky diving, no one seems particularly surprised to find that he was murdered. Detective Inspector Carol Ashton finds a long list of possible murderers—a list that includes family members who are positively jostling for position to be at the top of the list. Then an elaborate practical joke is played out at Milton’s funeral by his son, Ted, and more evidence begins piling up against him. Carol must act quickly to find out if Ted is indeed his father’s killer—or if he is simply being set up as yet another ‘fall guy’…

In Archer Mayor's Fall Guy, a body found in the trunk of a stolen car leads Joe Gunther and his team to crucial evidence in an infamous unsolved case from years past. A high-end stolen car is discovered in Vermont. A car filled with stolen items from a far-flung two state burglary spree. But it's what is in the trunk that brings Joe Gunther and his team from the Vermont Bureau of Investigation. In the trunk is the body of burglar in question - one Don Kalfus. Complicating matters, while the body was found in Vermont, it appears he was probably killed in the next state over, New Hampshire. The task force charged with finding out why Kalfus is murdered soon faces another problem. Within the pile of stolen cell phones found in the car is evidence of a notorious unsolved child abduction case from years earlier. Now the seemingly simple case has become more complicated and deadly, leading Gunther's team to be pulled from the New Hampshire coast to near the Canadian border as they attempt to find and capture the psychopath responsible for a tangled, historical web of misery, betrayal, and loss.

Handyman Cedric O'Toole likes his simple life. He lives by himself on a hardscrabble farm, collecting sheds full of junk and dreaming of his next invention. Then one day a slick city lawyer drives down his lane and his nightmare begins. Lori-Anne Wilkins, the wife of a wealthy local businessman, has fallen to her death from a deck Cedric built, and the furious widower has slapped him with a lawsuit. When Cedric goes to check out the accident site, he discovers that someone has tampered with the railing around the deck. It appears he's been set up to take the blame. But who might want Mrs. Wilkins dead? Then, when someone runs him off the road, he realizes that his life is in danger too. To clear his name and save his life, Cedric has to use his inventive mind to trap the real killer.

A witty, action-packed thriller starring a “tough, wisecracking British operative” (The New York Times Book Review). The British Intelligence outfit SR(2) has lost too many agents already trying to stop the European cocaine trade. Now they need someone unknown to succeed where they have failed—they need Philis. Whether he’s courting danger or women, this smuggler-turned-secret-agent is as villainous as he is seductive. Philis has no interest in helping the authorities—until a longtime friend is brutally tortured and an innocent woman beaten to within an inch of her life. Now Philis has but one aim: to find the ruthless drug leader behind it all, and make him pay for his crimes. But he has no idea what he’s about to get into, in this fast-paced espionage thriller featuring a hero who’s “as resilient as a rubber band” (Kirkus Reviews). “A master of the genre at the top of his game.” —Tom Kasey, bestselling author of Cold Kill

Three powerful men converge on the banks of the Red Cedar River in the early 1900s in southern Minnesota—George Albert Hormel, founder of what will become the $10 billion food conglomerate Hormel Foods; Alpha LaRue Eberhart, the author’s paternal grandfather and Hormel’s Executive Vice President and Corporate Secretary; and Ransome Josiah Thomson, Hormel’s comptroller. Over ten years, Thomson will embezzle $1.2 million from the company’s coffers, nearly bringing the company to its knees. The Butcher, The Embezzler, and The Fall Guy opens in 1922 as George Hormel calls Eberhart into his office and demands his resignation. Hailed as the true leader of the company he’d helped Hormel build—is Eberhart complicit in the embezzlement? Far worse than losing his job and the great wealth he’d rightfully accumulated is that his beloved young wife, Lena, is dying while their three children grieve alongside. Of course, his story doesn’t end there. In scale both intimate and grand, Cherington deftly weaves the histories of Hormel, Eberhart, and Thomson within the sweeping landscape of our country’s early industries, along with keen observations about business leaders gleaned from her thirty-five-year career advising top company executives. The Butcher, The Embezzler, and The Fall Guy equally chronicles Cherington’s journey from blind faith in family lore to a nuanced consideration of the three men’s great strengths and flaws—and a multilayered, thoughtful exploration of the ways we all must contend with the mythology of powerful men, our reverence for heroes, and the legacy of a complicated past.

The Fall Guy, first published in 1945, is a fast-paced noir murder mystery featuring Chicago P.I. Rush Henry. Joe Barry was the pen name of Joe Barry Lake (1909-1961), author of ten detective novels and a number of television shows. From the dust jacket: The door had scarcely closed on the mysterious young man who had sought protection from Rush Henry because he feared for his life when wealthy Paul Germaine, Sr., brought one of the strangest requests of Rush’s hectic career as a private investigator. Rush was to keep Chicago mobsters away from Germaine’s brilliant young daughter, Leslie, whose interest in criminal psychology had made her determined to find out, first-hand, what made a gangster tick. Five minutest later Rush found the mysterious young man stabbed to death in the alley outside his office. The dead man was Germaine’s son, Paul Germaine, Jr. Then a tall, cadaverous man in ministerial black informed Rush that he had seen the murderer run from the alley and instantly Rush knew that a strange mob had moved in. The tall man was Otho Brin, first of several San Francisco gangsters Rush was so soon to encounter. Was Brin playing a lone hand, or was he connected with suave, cultured Bernard Jago and his lovely daughter, Myrna? Was the San Francisco gang bucking the Chicago mob? Which had been responsible for young Germaine’s murder? And what was daring young Leslie Germaine’s connection with her brother’s death? A swift, baffling Crime Fiction of underworlds at war—and of the fall guy caught between.