Down Out Books: 337 books

Dark, gritty, disturbing. Those are the types of characters you’ll encounter in the award winning stories within this collection. Tough people in a tough world. But also real people, struggling with difficult decisions when faced with unthinkable circumstances. What happens when you discover a dead...

A Crime Novella. When two young girls disappear with a trunk-load of pot, unaware their payload has been packed with an extra five kilos of cocaine, a lovable loser persuades a sociopathic killer to pursue them across Northern California on a violent, twisted goose-chase that ends in a horrific...

When ex-soldier Joe Hunter agrees to protect grieving mother, Billie Womack, on behalf of a DEA contact, it's a pledge he will come to regret. Her husband, Richard, was a thief. In a desperate attempt to escape his pursuers, Richard apparently died in a car crash, along with their daughter,...

Harry Pines lives in Hawaii in "a better lifestyle than you'd expect from a squared-up ex-con." He manages a beachfront apartment setup that he owns in partnership with his friend Muhammad Ali, a Chicago restaurateur. Harry is a man of many dangerous skills — he was an Army Ranger...

BAD HABITS collects Keith Gilman’s short stories. “The best fiction has this feeling that someone’s just leaned close to whisper in our ear, ‘I’ve something important to tell you.’ Keith Gilman’s debut novel has and sustains that quality from the first page. You know right away...

Milton T. Burton, acclaimed author of The Rogue's Game, The Sweet and the Dead and most recently Nights of the Red Moon, has pulled together 17 short stories in a collection called Texas Noir. He starts with a hay baler in A Good Beginning, we're introduced to Sam MacCord in a couple of stories and...

Being a bad guy isn’t just a way of life. It’s an art. Eddie Ballard is a hitman who loves his job. He is also inexperienced and enjoys making the kind of noise that just isn’t professional. If Eddie wasn’t so good at what he does, He could be the next one put onto a slab. Cecil...

“The stories in this breathless and relentless collection are rendered in a voice both elegant and manic, as if we’re seeing the world through a surreal and yet precise kaleidoscope, one that both celebrates and condemns our foibles and follies. Satirical and cutting as Jonathan Swift, hectic...

There have been many courtroom dramas that glorified the great American legal system. This is not one of them. My Cousin Vinny has been voted the most re-watchable movie of all time. It’s a story about two wrongly accused young men and the wildly inappropriate attorney who must defend them in an...

The misdeeds and downfalls of characters drawn to the cultural panoply that is Los Angeles… The sun-kissed city of high hopes and second chances, where everyone seems to be from somewhere else. A siren’s call to dreamers, misfits, mystics and freaks, lost souls and purveyors of sin. They...

Ex-IRA hard-ass, wanted international criminal, and all-around hooligan Blacky Jaguar is back and on the run. After painting the Cross Bronx Expressway red—literally—and losing his beloved car Polly to his ex, Linda Chen (who isn’t returning his calls because she’s not a complete idiot),...

From Valley Girls to Valley of the Dolls, the L.A. Woman has captured our imagination and redefined the fairer sex. CJ Parker is our lifeguard, Lucy Arnaz our studio executive, Angelyne our reality star, and the Black Dahlia our murder victim. L.A. neighborhoods have spawned the Beverly Hills housewife,...

An innocent math professor runs for his life as teams of hitmen try to prevent publication of their government’s dark history… College professor Sam Teagarden stumbles upon a decades-old government cover-up when an encoded document mysteriously lands in his in-box, followed by a cluster...

Everyone bears secrets. Some of them become the lies we live. Others become the lies that kill. Wil Hardesty knows about secrets and how they build, one on another, until the truth is buried. Faced with the ever-widening estrangement from his wife, Hardesty answers a young woman's cry for help. The...