When the phone rings long after midnight, it spells trouble of the lethal kind for Dallas private eye Ed Earl Burch in a gritty and relentless hard-boiled thriller that races from the gleaming towers of Houston to the decadent charms of New Orleans and the stark desert mountains of the Texas Big Bend country and northern Mexico. Burch is a cashiered homicide detective with bad knees, a wounded liver and an empty bank account. He’s been hired to protect an old flame after the disappearance of her husband, a high-flying Houston financier who ripped off his clients, including some deeply unsavory gentlemen from New Orleans. It’s a simple job that goes wrong fast, plunging Burch into a ruthless contest where nothing and nobody can be trusted. Money and sex tempt him to break his own rules—twin temptations served up by the old flame, a rangy strawberry blonde with a violent temper and a terminal knack for larceny and betrayal. Those New Orleans gentlemen give the game a more murderous edge by sending two hitmen to reclaim their stolen goods and kill anybody involved in the score. Burch also faces an old adversary, Houston homicide detective Cider Jones, a mystic with Comanche blood who blames Burch for his partner’s death and wouldn’t mind seeing him wind up dead. When his best friend gets murdered in Dallas by hired muscle, Burch blames himself and grimly sets out for vengeance that also delivers a bloody form of redemption. The action is as remorseless and unpredictable as a runaway cement truck, leading to a lonely white chapel in an abandoned mining town on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. Jim Nesbitt’s first novel, THE LAST SECOND CHANCE, is an award-winning hardboiled thriller that also features Ed Earl Burch, the Dallas PI who has been called “a classic American anti-hero.” The book won the best hardboiled mystery category for 2016 from Indie Author Crime Masters and was named a five-star Top Pick by Underground Book Reviews and finalist for their 2017 Novel of The Year competition. MORE PAIN, MORE VICTIMS By Michael Ludden In his second noir thriller, "The Right Wrong Number", writer Jim Nesbitt takes us into a cast of characters so evil it's a wonder they can sleep at night. Or whether we will. Ed Earl Burch is searching for a man. Others are also searching, with motives so dark you'll quickly lose track of the body count. The kind of folks who like their killings slow and full of pain. A click, then a grinding of molars as the poor bastard clenched his jaws in a death grimace, his life already over. A slow spin to the concrete floor of the warehouse. Burch, a hard-drinking former cop with bad knees and an empty wallet, battles corrupt cops, assassins for hire, Mexican drug dealers, ex-lovers, the ghosts of ex-wives and the harsh memories of a lifetime of bad decisions. Almost everyone, it seems, wants Burch dead. Burch's only advantage, his instincts. If he was quick and lucky -- and someone was careless -- he might catch an averted eye, a missed step... Once again, the backdrop is Texas and it is in his love for the state, its traditions and history and its wilderness, that Nesbitt shines. Eagle Pass... The name brings to mind raptors on the wing, spiraling in the updrafts above a great sandstone cliff, flying over a rock gateway through the mountains... broken scrubby land full of mesquite, live oak, huajilla and cat's claw, with barely discernable folds, ancient and small ridgelines leading down to the Rio Grande. This is a hard-core, alcohol- and profanity-laced shoot-em-up you won't want to send to your mom. Unless she's a tough old bird from Amarillo. Forbidding country, rough, arid and isolated. But sparsely majestic and not deserted. Hippie river rats lived upstream in Terlingua and Lajitas. Inside the Big Bend National Park were ghost communities like Solis, La Clocha and San Vincente, now the primitive campsites for the hardy backpacker or river rafter. Burch may prevail. One hopes. But there will be more pain, more victims, more ghosts. Michael Ludden is an Atlanta-based journalist and author of the Florida detective mystery, Alfredo's Luck. MIDWEST BOOK REVIEWS "Connoisseurs of hard-boiled detective fiction have a two-fisted surprise in store! THE RIGHT WRONG NUMBERserves up a triple helping of intrigue, danger, and saucy scandal. Wildand dangerous, THE RIGHT WRONG NUMBER will keep the reader hooked to the very end." GRITTY LIKE SANDPAPER By Bill Crider If you're looking for gritty, The Right Wrong Number is as gritty asNumber 36 sandpaper. Ed Earl Burch is former cop and now a private-eye. He can't resist the wrong women, and when he gets a call from hisformer lover whose husband has disappeared, he takes the case, evenknowing he shouldn't. As it happens the husband has faked his deathbecause he owes money to some people who will be happy to have himkilled to get the money back. And because they think the wife might beinvolved, they'd be happy to