American Graveyards by Ray Nayler Subject: Crime Publisher: TTA Press (UK) Edition Our Price inc. p&p Status first edition trade paperback, B5, 132pp p/b, ISBN 095269476X, 2001 N/A out of stock

Dark, dangerous and intoxicating, Ray Nayler's fiction is a potent elixir that will slam your senses. It'll leave you shaken and stirred, with cool characters on ice, and a plot served up neat with a twist. Ready for a heady shot and a slow burn? Elise Lyons, Blue Murder

Ray Nayler's crime fiction claws its way into your mind and won't leave. He writes like Jim Thompson on crack, only his prose is twenty times better! Anthony Neil Smith, Plots With Guns

Crimewave Specials are a Crimewave spin-off, designed to publish longer novellas and short novels by themselves, but in the same format as Crimewave and, importantly, at the same price. The first Crimewave Special is a novel called American Graveyards by Ray Nayler, whose short story 'Cutting Wood, Carrying Water' appeared in Crimewave 4: Mood Indigo. The colour wraparound cover artwork is a night-time photograph taken in the Mojave desert by Troy Paiva.

The Mojave is a graveyard. It lies between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and through it runs a road where, in the middle of desert nights, all of the human predators in those two cities come to dump their prey. The desert is a burying ground for nuclear waste, for garbage and slag from the silver and gold mines, for abandoned cars and for abandoned people. Outcasts huddle in shacks far out in the night, away from prying eyes. In makeshift labs they mix methamphetamine and speed. Everything discarded, everything killed or broken or unwanted, it seems, ends up here. Sometimes, people find things. A hiker stumbles across a skull, a rusted six-shooter, a dead cowboy who took shade under a Joshua tree a hundred years ago and never stood up again. The police dig up a body and find two more beneath it. Most of the time, though, things stay buried...

Lance Bailey, PI, is on his last case and his last legs. The murderer he has been hunting all his adult life is just one step ahead of him. But before he can exact his final revenge, he must unravel a nasty web of conspiracy and murder in the Mojave desert. Haunted by an enigmatic nightmare and slowed down by age, Lance finds himself struggling to keep up with a world that is growing more and more fragmented and deadly with each passing moment.