Books by William Lashner
Freedom Road
Oliver Cross was 22 with a career in corporate law and all its marvelous bounty ahead of him when, during a famous night thick with politics, and raw violence, he saw within the swirling light of bonfire and cop car a different path. It would be hard, uncertain, a desperate grab for meaning and transcendence in a country tearing itself apart. Did he take the detour? Does it matter? For him, just the sight of it changed everything.
Now, fifty years later, it is time to deal with the wreckage. Read more
A Filthy Business
Good intentions: they'll bite you every time. A lifetime ago, brutally efficient fixer Phil Kubiak coldly cleaned up the messes of shady clients from Miami to Las Vegas by any means necessary - short of murder. Now he's one eye and one working leg short of the man he used to be, scarred beyond recognition, and with the feds and criminal organizations in hot pursuit. Throwing back sour beer in a dingy bar, Phil recounts the long story of his bitter life to the only person left to listen... Read more
The Four-Night Run
J.D. Scrbacek has just won the biggest trial of his career, but even as he crows to the press, his entire life blows sky-high. Was the bomb meant for him, or for his mobster client? In this seaside casino town where the tables run hot and the tensions run high, the odds say the attorney is a marked man.
Alone and on the run, Scrbacek flees into the city's forgotten underbelly, a ruined corridor called Crapstown, where he is forced to confront the ghosts of his past, his present, and his future. Somewhere in the sordid stream of his own existence lie the answers he needs. But in order to emerge from the depths of Crapstown, Scrbacek must argue for his life before a jury of the forgotten and the damned. Is he lawyer enough to save his own skin?
From the bestselling author of The Barkeep comes a raucous tale of reckoning, racketeering, and revenge. Read more
Guaranteed Heroes
In a nation still recovering from nuclear tragedy, Clyde Sparrow is working a dead-end guaranteed job in Chicago, and Moonis Fell is incarcerated in a Labor Camp for the Malcontented. But when Moonis's sister, Cecily, goes missing, the old friends escape their prisons to search for her in post-fallout America.
Moonis and Clyde follow Cecily's trail until it leads them into the atomic-ravaged heart of the Midwest, an outlaw territory of dark legends and darker truths, governed by a ruthless barbarian named Raden.
But along with menace and death, this poisoned wasteland contains the possibility of a freedom beyond imagination - if only Moonis and Clyde, and the misfits who join their quest, can find the heroism to grab hold of it.
But they better hurry, because the Homeland Guard has a different idea and it is coming. Read more
The Barkeep
Justin Chase is the perfect barkeep, tending bar as he lives his life, in a state of Zen serenity. At least until Birdie Grackle, a yellow-haired, foul-mouthed alcoholic from Texas, walks into his bar, orders a Mojito, and makes a startling confession.
Six years ago Justin's life was ripped apart when he discovered his mother's bludgeoned corpse in the foyer of the family home. Now Justin's father is serving a life sentence and Justin, after a stint in the asylum, drowns his emotions in a pool of inner peace. But when Birdie Grackle claims to be the hit man who murdered Justin's mother for the money, Justin is hurled back to the emotions, back to the past, and, most frighteningly of all, back to the father he has tried to leave behind.
Who hired Birdie Grackle to kill Justin's mother? As Justin pieces together the truth, a merciless killing machine begins stalking the barkeep, leaving a trail of dead in his wake. Someone wants to bury the truth, and maybe Justin, too. As the terror closes in, Justin had better find some answers and find them fast, because the stakes have been raised, his life is on the line, and murder is so not Zen. Read more
The Accounting
Jon Willing was just a teenager when he and his pals, Augie and Ben, stole a fortune in drug money. Brazen with youth and stoned out of their gourds, they thought they had the perfect plan for getting away with it.
They were wrong.
Twenty-five years later, Jon's marriage is on the rocks, his kids are virtual strangers, and the recession has taken his job and decimated his finances. Worst of all, when he finds Augie murdered in Vegas, he knows the past has risen from its grave to grab him by the throat. Read more
Blood and Bone
For a son, every funeral before his father’s death is a rehearsal and every funeral thereafter is a memorial.
Kyle Byrne, the illegitimate son of a prominent Philadelphia lawyer, had to sneak into his father’s funeral when he was fourteen years old. Twelve years later, his father’s death still casts a shadow upon his heart. Read more