Madge — Ed Lynskey

For his next hardboiled outing, P.I. Frank Johnson takes up the missing-person case of Knox Yowell, a machinist who operates a metal lathe in a job shop. One August morning, Knox leaves for the corner bodega to buy his cigarettes and never returns home. His distraught wife, Madge Yowell, discovers Frank's business card in Knox's nightstand drawer. However, Frank has no memory of having met or spoken to Knox. The Yowells live in Hingham, a blue-collar suburb 12 miles south of Boston, and Frank has never traveled from his small town of Pelham, Virginia, up north to Boston. Of course, nothing is as it appears on the surface in Frank's murky, noirish crime world. As Frank probes deeper into Knox Yowell's disappearance, he leans on his long-time friend and business partner, Gerald Peyton; his medical examiner wife, Dreema; and his brilliant but outspoken attorney, Robert Gatlin. The investigation soon compels Frank to reckon with the tragedy of his boyhood, when his parents died in a car accident caused by a drunken motorist. Violence and mayhem rack Frank as he struggles to set things right. Critically acclaimed crime novelist James Crumley endorsed the P.I. Frank Johnson Mystery Series. With a plot as complex as your grandmother's crocheted doilies, Mr. Lynskey creates a portrait of the rural hill country that rings as true as the clank of a Copenhagen can on a PBR can, as does his handle on guns, love, and betrayal. This novel is well worth the read and makes me want more.#1 New York Times bestselling author James Rollins states, Ed Lynskey's P.I. Frank Johnson's books are as hard-bitten and hard-boiled as they come. The dialogue crackles with such sharpness that you'd swear sparks were jumping off the pages. And P.I. Frank Johnson is a character cut from the Tarantino mold: tough, wounded, conflicted, and badass.New York Times bestselling author and Edgar Award-winning author Megan Abbott writes the P.I. Frank Johnson mystery series, which bears the richest nicotine and bourbon stains of the hardboiled genre, yet also bristles with vitality. The plot sings, the characters are twisty and textured, and the violence is brutal but inevitable. These elements would be more than enough, yet Ed Lynskey offers so much more in the form of a perfectly pitched prose style that swings effortlessly from back-country grit to Appalachian poetry and back again.