Down Out Books: 337 books

This third issue of Down & Out: The Magazine features a new Jim Brodie story by Barry Lancet, whose novel Japantown has been optioned by J.J. Abrams and Warner Brothers for the Hollywood treatment. Here we have Brodie on a trip to his home in Japan and a quest to find out what’s going on with...

Tyler Garrett is a model SWAT officer whose good looks, education and familial status add to that image. The fact that he is a black man in the predominately white Spokane Police Department only adds to the city administration’s pride in one of their own. He’s often pointed to as an example of...

When Henry Swann is asked by his quirky partner, Goldblatt, to find a missing psychic who’s swindled his ex-wife out of a small fortune, he just can’t say no. Although he doesn’t actually expect to get paid, he figures it might give him a chance to finally learn more about his partner’s mysterious...

Dale is a crooked cop. It started slow, but grew like a cancer and now he can’t get out from under the thumb of Tat, a would-be kingpin in every vice he can turn a profit with. And now Dale’s number is up—the top brass knows. But instead of getting busted, Dale gets an offer. The mayor’s...

Private Investigator David Drago is a former policeman and Gulf War veteran struggling with his combat experiences, his time spent in the psychological ward of a veterans’ hospital, and the darkness of his past. When he is approached by a mysterious client who hires him to locate his missing fiancée,...

Picking up from where our last issue left off, we have another group of crime stories written especially for us. Starting with ex-police detective Lissa Marie Redmond whose short fiction has appeared in anthologies like Akashic’s Buffalo Noir and whose debut novel will be out in February 2018, we...

Danny Zelko, 13 going on 14, needs to get rid of his mom’s boyfriend, Harry. The guy is a creep. Drinks too much, locks Danny out of the house, gets in Danny’s face and calls him Danielle. Of course everyone blames Danny. It’s his fault he gets into fights at school. It’s his fault...

Never before has killing someone benefitted such a good cause… In 2014, Crimespree Magazine held an internet-based flash fiction contest. The rules were simple: somewhere in the story you had to “Kill Dan Malmon.” That was it. The story had to be brief, inventive, and somewhere, Malmon...

In the ballroom of a sparsely furnished Connecticut mansion, police find a shocking sight: four bodies lined up next to each other, three teenagers and a middle-aged woman, each lying on a blanket, each shot once in the head. In an upstairs bedroom: an elderly woman and the family dog, both of them...

We know a healthy appetite for well-written short stories exists and we want to help make things better. Our goal with Down & Out: The Magazine is to be a little different than other magazines by standing on the shoulders of the giants that have come before us, or at least tiptoe along the arrows...

Gentrification is moving in hard and fast in Montreal’s South-Western districts. D’Arcy Kennedy finds himself out of breath, out of a job and raising a kid in a small home meant for another era. As the bulldozers take away entire chapters of his life, he turns to old acquaintances for work,...

What price can you put on a human life? Times are tough. Cabbie Lester Banks can’t pay his bills. His gorgeous young neighbor, Chelsea, is also one step from the streets. Lester makes a sordid business deal with her. Things turn out worse than he could ever have imagined. “Alec Cizak...

The Shill Struggling actress Jane Innes is seduced by a handsome new arrival in her acting class. He makes a proposition. He admits he’s a con man and needs Jane to pose as a rich, carefree heiress to fulfill her part in his intricate scam.  Would you agree?  Or run the other way? All...

Francis Hoyt, arrogant, athletic, brilliant, manipulative and ruthless, is a master burglar. He specializes in stealing high-end silver, breaking into homes that seem impenetrable. He’s never been caught in the act, although he has spent some time in prison on a related charge, time he used to hone...