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CLEAN HANDS: A GUS ROURKE NOVEL, Book One of the Calder County Novels
David H. Tolly’s Clean Hands is a conspiracy-tinged crime novel built around a sharp premise: philanthropist Eleanor Grant is murdered during a gala at her own estate, while two hundred influential guests are close enough to witness everything and somehow see nothing. Detective Gus Rourke quickly recognizes that the apparent burglary is a carefully staged story, and the investigation leads from a missing manuscript and a hidden memory card to a century-old network that turns dirty money, political influence, and violence into respectable philanthropy. The financial trail is unusually important here. Charities, trusts, consulting payments, leases, and donor-advised funds aren’t just background details. They’re the machinery of the mystery, and Tolly explains them clearly enough that the reader can follow the money without feeling trapped in an accounting seminar.
Rourke is the novel’s strongest anchor. He’s a colorblind detective who trusts shapes more than colors, paper more than screens, and patient observation more than an easy explanation. His numbered rules at the beginning of each chapter give the book a sturdy procedural rhythm while revealing the personal losses behind his methods. He’s joined by an appealing team, especially his tech-minded partner Olivia Hayes, financial investigator June “Sparrow” Okafor, medical examiner Eliza Martin, and his journalist daughter, Casey. Their different skills keep the investigation moving, but their personal connections to the case give it weight. The most affecting parts often involve parents and children, including Eleanor and her estranged daughter Lily, Rourke and Casey, and the frightened mother who becomes a weapon in someone else’s plan.
Readers of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels will recognize the appeal of a stubborn investigator following evidence into rooms where powerful people expect obedience. Like Bosch, Rourke is guided by a private moral code and has little patience for institutions that value calm appearances over inconvenient truth. Tolly’s novel, though, is more openly focused on financial systems and inherited influence. Its villain is larger than a single murderer. The real adversary is a culture in which respectable people pass responsibility downward until nobody at the top appears to have touched the crime. That gives Clean Hands some of the institutional sweep of a John Grisham thriller, while its crime-scene work and damaged detective place it firmly in the police procedural tradition.
The novel moves quickly through short chapters, shifting viewpoints and frequent discoveries, and Tolly has a knack for ending scenes on lines that pull the reader forward. The book delivers a satisfying resolution to Eleanor’s murder while leaving the wider conflict alive. Clean Hands works as a complete mystery, but its final pages also make Gus Rourke’s next investigation feel like a natural continuation of a fight he’s only begun to understand.
Pages: 210 | ASIN : B0H7FTJHS5
Taking Up Life in Both Hands
Taking Up Life in Both Hands is a sharp, crowded political satire that drops readers into the overlapping worlds of Big Law, Catholic health care, presidential politics, and corporate medicine. Its central pair makes the novel work: Claire Flanagan, an ambitious young health lawyer trying to survive a morally slippery law firm, and Sister Ursula, a cigar-smoking nun determined to protect the charitable mission of the enormous hospital system she helped build. Their relationship develops from an awkward professional assignment into a genuine alliance, giving the story an emotional center beneath all the schemes, kickbacks, campaign maneuvering, and executive backstabbing.
Tim Greaney writes with the confidence of someone who knows these institutions from the inside. The legal and healthcare details feel specific without turning the novel into a textbook, and the book is especially good at showing how respectable language can disguise ugly behavior. Executives talk about innovation and restructuring when they mean profit and control. Lawyers talk about loyalty when they mean obedience. Politicians wrap raw ambition in patriotism, religion, or public service. Greaney keeps translating that polished language back into plain English, usually through Claire’s skeptical observations or Sister Ursula’s blunt refusal to tolerate nonsense.
The closest comparison is probably Carl Hiaasen, especially novels such as Sick Puppy or Strip Tease. Like Hiaasen, Greaney builds comedy from institutions that have become so corrupt and self-important that they barely need exaggeration. His cast also includes the sort of schemers, opportunists, damaged idealists, and cheerful eccentrics who’d fit comfortably into a Hiaasen plot. Greaney’s humor is more rooted in legal procedure and healthcare policy, though, and his satire spends more time explaining how the machinery works. That gives the book a heavier factual texture, but it also makes the misconduct feel plausible rather than merely cartoonish.
The novel’s greatest strength is the way its comedy and moral seriousness reinforce each other. Claire’s gradual decision to risk her career, Sister Ursula’s insistence that health care should still involve caring, and the eventual exposure of Brian Shea’s schemes give the sprawling plot a satisfying direction. The final chapters bring consequences, personal renewal, and a touching farewell without losing the book’s irreverent voice. Taking Up Life in Both Hands is an energetic institutional comedy about conscience under pressure, and its best moments come when two very different women recognize that professionalism means more than protecting the people who sign the checks.
Pages: 244 | ASIN : B0GSXMS522
There Once Was an Idea Called America
Richard Daniel McCann’s There Once Was an Idea Called America is a forceful examination of what the author sees as the gradual dismantling of the nation’s economic, political, and cultural foundations. McCann’s central concern is that America has drifted away from the principles that once supported its constitutional republic, including national sovereignty, individual liberty, religious faith, strong families, private ownership, and a thriving middle class. Rather than treating the country’s problems as isolated controversies, he presents them as interconnected parts of a larger struggle over what America will become.
The book begins with the economic pressures facing the middle class, tracing the effects of deindustrialization, corporate consolidation, automation, stagnant wages, political neglect, and the movement of jobs overseas. McCann connects economic insecurity to the growing influence of corporations, lobbyists, wealthy donors, and the military-industrial establishment. His discussion of campaign financing, Citizens United, super PACs, dark money, and the revolving door between government and lobbying gives the book one of its strongest through lines. Whether discussing Democratic or Republican administrations, he argues that ordinary citizens increasingly compete against powerful institutions with far greater access to elected officials.
From there, McCann turns to national sovereignty and freedom of expression. He views uncontrolled immigration, international governing bodies, foreign military commitments, and open-border policies as threats to the country’s ability to determine its own future. His chapter on free speech expands the argument into universities, school boards, corporations, government agencies, and social media platforms. The examples involving cancel culture, campus speech restrictions, online censorship, book bans, and political pressure show that his concern isn’t confined to one institution. His writing is direct and urgent, and he makes it clear that protecting disagreeable speech is essential to preserving meaningful debate.
The later chapters focus on journalism, education, religion, crime, gender politics, abortion, and the stability of the American family. McCann believes news organizations have traded impartial reporting for political advocacy, creating a public that no longer trusts the information it receives. He writes with the same intensity about cultural issues, particularly parental authority, Christian faith, public education, and traditional family structures. At times, the rapid movement between subjects and the consistently confrontational language can make the analysis feel more like an extended warning than a measured investigation. Still, the book’s organization, extensive references, historical context, and consistent viewpoint give readers a clear understanding of the author’s position and the values he hopes to defend.
There Once Was an Idea Called America will appeal most to readers concerned about political corruption, globalism, free speech, border security, media bias, family values, and the future of American democracy. It’s particularly suited to conservative readers, independent voters, students of contemporary politics, and anyone interested in arguments for restoring national identity and civic responsibility. As a work of conservative political nonfiction, American political commentary, cultural criticism, and social issues analysis, the book offers a passionate call for citizens to protect constitutional government, rebuild domestic institutions, and take a more active role in shaping the nation’s future.
Pages: 172 | ISBN : 978-1608628971
Blood Gilt
Jessica Housand’s Blood Gilt is a dark, sprawling crime novel about inheritance in the ugliest sense: inherited violence, inherited loyalties, inherited countries, and inherited guilt. At its center is Alejandro Whitmore, a Salvadoran-born young man raised through war, abandonment, exploitation, and his father Jared’s cartel-adjacent empire. When Jared sends him back to El Salvador to help secure a narcotrafficking arrangement, Alejandro isn’t just returning to a place. He’s walking straight into the family, history, and pain he’s spent years trying not to look at.
What makes the novel work is how tightly it stays with Alejandro’s damaged point of view. He’s volatile, romantic, cruel, funny, perceptive, and often frightening, but he’s never simple. His relationship with Moni gives the story a charge that’s part attraction, part suspicion, and part desperate wish for escape. Their chemistry feels messy in a believable way, especially because neither of them arrives clean or uncomplicated.
The book is at its strongest when the personal and political are tangled together. El Salvador’s civil conflict, U.S. intervention, cartel routes, police corruption, migration, and family separation aren’t just background details. They shape the way people speak, choose, love, and betray. Housand gives the story the size of a political thriller, but the emotional weight comes from Alejandro’s fractured bonds with Maria, Ana, Jared, JJ, and the ghosts he keeps carrying around with him.
The prose has a hard, feverish energy. It can be brutal, sensual, and reflective within the same scene, which fits a narrator who lives in extremes. The violence is intense, but it’s rarely an empty spectacle. It keeps circling back to the question of what a person becomes when survival has always meant obedience, force, or performance. The result is a novel that feels both intimate and operatic, with family drama, crime, romance, and historical trauma all pushing against each other.
Readers who enjoy the family power games of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather will recognize the pull of blood, legacy, and criminal empire here, but Blood Gilt moves through a different moral and cultural landscape. It’s less interested in making power look grand than in showing what power costs the children born under it. This is a big, bruising novel about a man trying to decide whether he’s doomed to repeat the violence that made him, and that question gives the book its strongest pulse.
Pages: 436 | ASIN : B0H8QKJB1Y
Fairness, Responsibility, and Justice
The Great Awakening takes readers inside a version of Earth where nearly everyone awakens in a near-death-like dream, returning to life remade by spiritual certainty. What did you want readers to feel during the early chapters, when the awakening seems overwhelmingly positive?
Through Raymond, I wanted readers to experience the awakening as he did. To feel the same sense of warmth, belonging, and hope that completely reshapes his view of the world. As the scope of the awakening expands, I wanted them to imagine how that kind of transformation might ripple through society, changing not just individuals but humanity as a whole. Most importantly, I wanted readers to embrace the awakening rather than question it. If they genuinely believe they’ve found paradise, then when the other side of the coin is finally revealed, the emotional and moral impact is far more powerful.
What questions about consciousness most fascinate you?
Consciousness is an almost bottomless rabbit hole. Beyond the unanswerable question of why consciousness exists at all, I’m fascinated that we don’t even understand how it exists. Sam Harris often points out that, based solely on our conscious experience, we’re not even aware that we have a brain. Everything we know about the physical machinery behind consciousness comes from observation and science, not from experience itself. If we ever begin to understand consciousness, perhaps we can tackle the next question: whether we truly have free will. Neuroscience increasingly suggests we may not, yet our lived experience makes that conclusion feel almost impossible to accept. And if free will is an illusion, what does that mean for fairness, responsibility, and justice? That’s a rabbit hole I don’t think has a bottom.
What conversations do you hope readers have after finishing the book?
I hope readers continue thinking about the book after they turn the final page. If humanity could truly eliminate greed, jealousy, hatred, and suffering, would we actually be better off? If so, does it matter how that transformation came about? Would it have to arise organically, or would an engineered version be just as meaningful? Those aren’t questions I wrote the book to answer. They’re questions I wrote to explore, and I hope readers find themselves exploring them as well.
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But some are left behind—trapped in their old selves while the rest of humanity moves forward without them. They endure pain, isolation, and quiet erasure under the guise of enlightenment. When a small group of the Unawakened escapes a brutal confinement, rebellion and scientific inquiry begin to peel back the dream’s surface, pointing to the possibility that its source is anything but divine.
As the truth emerges, peace reveals its price. Moral certainty collides with survival. The Great Awakening confronts readers with a haunting question: if an entrancing paradise ends human suffering, but quietly decides who belongs—and who doesn’t—would you let it continue, or would you dare to wake the world?
Longer Than A New York Minute: A Samantha Wright Crime Series #3
Theresa Janson’s Longer Than a New York Minute is a crime novel wrapped tightly around a love story, a family story, and a story about healing after violence. Samantha Wright Little Bear is no longer living the FBI life that once defined her, but she hasn’t lost the instincts that made her a profiler. Now she’s a wife, mother, counselor, writer, and advocate on the reservation, trying to build the kind of life she and Will keep calling “simple and real.”
The mystery begins with the death of Tad Collins, a wealthy New Yorker who had become chosen family to Sam and Will. What’s first labeled a suicide doesn’t sit right with Sam, especially once she and Will look closer. Her grief sharpens rather than clouds her judgment, and the investigation gives the book its procedural backbone. When Sam says, “He was murdered Will,” the story shifts from sorrow into purpose.
What makes the book feel personal is how much of it lives in the everyday rhythms around the case. There are meals, babies, horses, family routines, anniversaries, and quiet conversations at the lodge pole. Janson gives Sam and Will’s marriage a lot of room on the page, and their intimacy is part of how they communicate, grieve, reconnect, and steady each other. The result is a novel where romance isn’t a subplot tucked beside the crime; it’s part of the engine.
The book also spends serious time with abuse, trauma, and the difficult work of helping people who may not be ready or able to leave danger behind. Sam’s counseling work with abused women gives the story moral weight, and it connects back to the dedication in a meaningful way. This isn’t just a murder investigation about one victim; it’s about how violence spreads through families and communities, and how people like Sam try to interrupt it one person at a time.
Longer Than a New York Minute is best read as a continuation of a deeply established emotional world. It’s intimate, protective, grief-struck, sensual, and family-centered, with the mystery acting as one strand in a larger portrait of survival and commitment. The book’s heart is Sam and Will’s chosen life together, and the crime plot matters because it threatens the people, peace, and hard-won sense of home they’ve built.
Pages: 200
Violations of Natural Order
Eros and Order: Love That Creates and Destroys explores the fragile boundary between love and control through literary stories of marriage, obsession, rescue, crime, immigration, and moral consequence. What drew you to the idea of examining love as a creative and destructive force?
Actually, the only story written specifically for this collection is “No Good Deed.” All the others had their independent inspirations, with three of them—“Perfect Girl,” “I Am Zico,” and “The Story of Aunt Jenny”—being derived from actual events. The unity of the collection occurred to me later as I began to assemble the collection from stories I had previously written. Then, finally seeing that the unity of the stories consisted of love’s changeable nature, I wrote “No Good Deed” as a commentary on that theme. The story’s character, Nora, has experienced a lack of normal parental love and, to compensate, has retreated from life into a Gothic cult. She has become so distrustful of what most of us regard as normal life—and love—that she hesitates to recognize it, let alone accept it, when it materializes in the character Ronnie, who is attempting to save her from herself.
The title story has a strong classical sensibility, with ideas of vows, order, betrayal, and consequence. How did classical themes influence the collection?
The ancient Greeks had a keen sense of order, which we shared in a Christianized version from the Middle Ages until it was shattered by the horrors of World War I. The Greeks also recognized that erotic love could, if allowed, challenge and even destroy that order in individuals, even if done unintentionally. Consider the myth of Oedipus, who kills his father and marries his mother, without recognizing their true identities. Nevertheless, a plague descends on Thebes, the city Oedipus rules. And to lift that plague, the double sins that Oedipus has committed must be expiated, which he accomplishes by blinding himself.
Collectively, the stories in Eros and Order deal with violations of natural order: a woman who deserts her husband and young children in the title story, a father who imposes unnatural restrictions on his daughter in “Perfect Girl,” a girl who grows up without parental love in “No Good Deed.” Once the natural order is broken, it must be restored. The fact that the rebalancing does not occur immediately may deceive us into believing that we can escape it, but just as Sandra Patterson eventually learns in “Eros and Order,” we cannot.
A wonderful source for studying the evolutionary history of love in Western culture is C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love (1936).
Several stories explore the danger of confusing love with ownership, rescue, or control. Was there a particular moral question you wanted readers to wrestle with?
Yes, just what constitutes a beneficial, healthy relationship that we can recognize as love? The answer waits at the end of the collection in “The Story of Aunt Jenny,” a folktale about the Underground Railroad in the Mid-Ohio Valley of what became the state of West Virginia. Aunt Jenny risks her own freedom to help other escaped slaves, for West Virginia was still part of Virginia and therefore the Confederacy during most of her lifetime. Her actions are in sharp contrast to those of Sandra Patterson in the story that opens the collection. Sandra seeks complete personal freedom and so abandons her responsibilities to her husband and children. Aunt Jenny risks her personal freedom to help others achieve it.
Ruggiero Bellafatezza, the crime boss father of Serena in “Perfect Girl,” very well illustrates the dangers of attempting to control others as he imposes unnatural restrictions on his daughter’s romantic life for the benefit of his criminal activity by pledging her in marriage to his underboss, Ricky Lanza. Serena rebels by having a different beau for each day of the week in order to flaunt her independence until tragedy results.
“No Good Deed” offers hope while still questioning whether love can truly save someone. What do you think love can realistically offer people in moments of despair?
Well, if nothing else, the collection shows that love has a variable and elusive character, but it can be decisive in saving someone. In “No Good Deed,” Ronnie attempts to do just that for Nora, whom he has just met, despite warnings from his coworkers and quite strongly from Nora herself that he shouldn’t. But he emphasizes to her that to lift herself out of a life that at times has involved homelessness, she must create a change in herself; he can only help her do that. Thus, at the story’s resolution, Nora must decide whether she will try to change, with Ronnie’s help, or remain in her adopted family—a Goth tribal cult. Thus, for love to succeed, it must involve a commitment by both participants.
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A teen fashion model who plots revenge against her father for the murder of her lover.
A Detroit factory worker who falls for a Goth girl who warns him not to.
A Moroccan immigrant who dies in the tough streets of Napoli.
A married couple mired in a Babel of their own making.
A folktale about a heroic woman and the Underground Railroad in West Virginia.
Neutrality Act
The Consulting Agent: Neutrality Act, by Jonathan M. Bryant, is a historical noir crime and espionage novel set in Atlanta in 1939, just before the world tips fully into war. The story follows Mark Morgan, a damaged former corporate fixer turned consulting agent, as he is hired to keep watch over German delegates attending the Baptist World Alliance meeting. What begins as a protective job quickly pulls him into Nazi politics, local corruption, murder, police violence, and the uneasy question of what neutrality means when evil is standing right in front of you.
What I appreciated most about this book is how lived-in it feels. Bryant gives Atlanta texture: the heat, the class divisions, the racial lines, the clubs, the trolleys, the old buildings, the stink of streets that have not recovered from hard times. The city is not just a backdrop. It presses on Mark from every side. The noir genre works well here because Mark is bruised in all the ways a noir lead should be, but he’s not a cartoon of cynicism. He’s weary, proud, scared, impulsive, and often slower to understand people than he thinks he is. That made him interesting to follow. I did not always admire him, but I believed him.
The author also makes a smart choice by tying the mystery to real historical tension rather than treating history like decoration. The Baptist World Alliance, Nazi delegates, American isolationism, antisemitism, segregation, and the coming war all sit under the plot like a low rumble. Sometimes the book is a detective story, sometimes an espionage tale, and sometimes a character study about a man trying to decide what kind of person he still is. I liked that the title keeps echoing through the story. Neutrality is not presented as clean or noble. It starts to feel like a thin coat of paint over fear, self-interest, and exhaustion. That is where the novel has its sharpest edge.
I would recommend The Consulting Agent: Neutrality Act to readers who enjoy historical fiction with crime, espionage, and moral tension woven together. Fans of noir mysteries, prewar spy fiction, and character-driven detective stories will get the most out of it, especially if they like books that care as much about atmosphere and history as they do about plot. It’s thoughtful, gritty, and grounded, with enough danger to keep the pages moving and enough unease to linger after the last chapter.
Pages: 275 | ASIN : B0GHVRDKHW
