TOWER with Ken Bruen (2009)
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 collaborating with a mad Celt from the West of Ireland 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 as incendiary as it is heart shriven.
REVIEWS
Tower goes off like a slo-mo explosion, a raging blast of white-heat light. It's a compelling study of pathologies, and style, and friendship and fate. Fueled by tenderness and murderous hate, it's as tender as it is brutal, tender as a savage wound, ragged and raw. Here be monsters, crippled monsters: Nicky and Todd are the truest angels and demons of our mean streets I've read for some time. —Declan Burke, author of The Big O
Tower is spare, powerful, surprisingly tender. And as seamless a piece of two-author writing as you'll ever find." —S. J. Rozan, Edgar Award-winning author of The Shanghai Moon
Taking up the storied themes of crime fiction - loyalty and betrayal, temptation and treachery - Tower lifts and elevates them, forging a tale both barbaric and baleful, swaggering and broken-hearted. Brutal, soaring street poetry to take your breath away. —Megan Abbott, Edgar Award-winning author of Queenpin
EXCERPT
"Tower by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman," Crimewav.com, Oct. 3, 2009
INTERVIEWS
- Interview about TOWER with Barbara Peters of The Poisoned Pen, on YouTube.
- Bruen/Coleman, The Big Adios: Crime Fiction and Film Forum
PAGE 69 AND PAGE 99 TESTS
Go here for the page 69 test and here for the page 99 test.
WHERE TO BUY
Available at bookstores, Busted Flush Press (to see other Busted Flush books, click here), Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Murder by the Book, and wherever fine books are sold.
AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS
Winner of Macavity- best novel
nominated for:
Anthony - best original paperback
Spinetingler Magazine Best Novel - Legends
Book of the Year - Foreward Reviews
Crimespree Magazine - Best Novel of 2009
STILL MORE COMMENTS (they just keep coming)
Tower would make an outstanding gift to anybody in the Witness Protection Program who is feeling nostalgic for the streets. Bruen and Coleman work great together - try to guess where one ends and the other begins. A rough and profane read, with haunting echoes of a Southie of the mind. —Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone
Haunted by a genuinely unnerving sense of dread, this breathtaking, blood-dimmed tale unfolds with delirious, whiskey-soaked ferocity. Volatile and intoxicating, Tower blazes with a hardboiled intensity that is impossible to resist. —Declan Hughes, Edgar Award-nominated author of All the Dead Voices
With Tower, Bruen and Coleman deliver an unflinching, yet moving portrait of friendship in the face of blood, dishonor, and death. —Peter Spiegelman, Shamus Award-winning author of Red Cat
Tower is a fast getaway car of a novel—raw, brutal, and with enough Irish treachery to fill a hundred shamrock bars. If your taste is for hard-boiled, it doesn’t get boiled any harder than by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman in Tower. —Thomas H. Cook, Edgar Award-winning author of The Fate of Katherine Carr
Classic Bruen and Coleman—it doesn’t get better than Tower. —Cara Black, best-selling author of Murder in the Latin Quarter
Tower is short and swift, and dark fun. Highly recommended. —Joe R. Lansdale, Edgar Award-winning author of The Bottoms and Vanilla Ride
Great writing - the dirt of it, the hog of it - is less about telling stories than it is about recreating experience. When you read Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman, you’re way out there past just reading stories, you’re reading lives, lives that worm and burn their way into your own. —James Sallis
[A] small, intimate book with a limited cast and compact, explosive plot - and it is seamless … gritty, with sharply drawn characters and an unstoppable pace. —Linda Brown, The Mystery Bookstore, Los Angeles