THE FACE OF EVIL Bill Oxford is a fixer, as cynical as they come. When the PR firm he works for sends him to Newport Beach to ruin a local attorney’s reputation, he knows he’s taking it strictly on an “or else” basis. Bill has been involved in some nasty jobs and his boss has enough on him to send him to San Quentin if he doesn’t come through for them. The first person he meets in town is Nile Lisbon, and the attraction is immediate and mutual. Nile is the local assistant D. A. with close ties to the lawyer Bill’s supposed to ruin. He falls for her hard and decides to ditch his mission. Unfortunately, his bosses have too much riding on this one, and Bill’s decision to go straight might be his last. “John MacPartland captures the loss of innocence, the yearning for something that never really was, the hope of redemption, and the cost of making a stand finally.”—David Vineyard, Mystery*File “McPartland’s best book is The Face of Evil, about the fixer Bill Oxford, who’s been on the long downward slide of compromise, complicity, corruption, and has been sent to Long Beach by the PR agency to which he’s attached to ruin a genuinely decent reform candidate, upon pain of being stripped of all his high-living perks and slammed into prison. It is tense and well-made throughout.”—John Frasier “[McPartland’s] characters can barely the control powerful emotions that are bubbling just below the surface. The men are prone to mayhem and the women (though they know better) are attracted to violence.”—Reading California Fiction John Donald McPartland was born April 13, 1911, in Chicago, Illinois. In 1943, he was inducted into the U.S. Army, and later, as an Army Reservist, he served again in the Korean War, at which point he became a staff writer on the Stars and Stripes newspaper. In between wars, he wrote a book, Sex in Our Changing World, and joined the staff of Life magazine. After Korea, he moved to Monterey, California, and began to publish a series of hardboiled thrillers with Gold Medal Books. And after his early death in Monterey on September 14, 1958, from a heart attack, it was discovered that he had two families—his legal wife and son in Mill Valley, California; and a mistress in Monterey who bore him five children and was named “Mother of the Year” in 1956.