Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman: Tower (USA 2013)

From the Publisher:
The author of Blitz and the author of the Jesse Stone novels collaborate on a "rough and profane read" about two childhood friends who become criminals (Daniel Woodrell).

Nick's Irish-American father, a Brooklyn rent-a-cop working security in the World Trade Center's North Tower, named him after a Hemingway hero. The old man must have been expecting a different kind of kid. Because, like the R&B song says, Nick was born under a bad sign. As aimless as a stray bullet, his only constants are 'Nam movies, pulp novels, and an unquestioning devotion to his childhood friend, Todd, a Jewish New York con artist with connections to the Boston mob.

When Todd inducts Nick into his world of petty crime, it starts with reckless fun -- scoring weed, low-level stings, and burglary. But the deeper they sink into the world of the syndicate, the more they realize how unknowable a friend can be, and how unprepared they are to rescue themselves, and their souls, from the gutter.

Alternately telling this "brutally poetic" story from the perspectives of Nick and Todd, award-winning "noir masters" Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Colemen "shine, dropping in-jokes, experimenting and displaying all the literary chops that have made their novels such cult favorites among mystery fans" (Publishers Weekly).

Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman: Tower. A Novel. MysteriousPress.com / Open Road Media, ISBN: 9781480405929 (March, 2013), eBook, 2 MB (ca. 172 p.), $9.99.

Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman: Tower (USA 2009)

From the Publisher:
Born into a rough Brooklyn neighborhood, outsiders in their own families, Nick and Todd forge a lifelong bond that persists in the face of crushing loss, blood, and betrayal. Low-level wiseguys with little ambition and even less of a future, the friends become major players in the potential destruction of an international crime syndicate that stretches from the cargo area at Kennedy Airport to the streets of New York, Belfast, and Boston to the alleyways of Mexican border towns. Their paths are littered with the bodies of undercover cops, snitches, lovers, and stone-cold killers.

In the tradition of The Long Goodbye, Mystic River, and The Departed, Tower is a powerful meditation on friendship, fate, and fatality. A twice-told tale done in the unique format of parallel narratives that intersect at deadly crossroads, Tower is like a beautifully crafted knife to the heart.

Imagine a Brooklyn rabbi/poet - Reed Farrel Coleman - collaborating with a mad Celt from the West of Ireland - Ken Bruen - to produce a novel unlike anything you've ever encountered. A ferocious blast of gut-wrenching passion that blends the fierce granite of Galway and the streetwise rap of Brooklyn. Fasten your seat belts, this is an experience that is as incendiary as it is heart shriven.

Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman: Tower. A Novel. Busted Flush Press, ISBN: 9781935415077 (September, 2009), 172 p., $15.00.