The Homicide Department is upside down—Richard Christie is in the hospital, Artie Dolan is headed away on vacation, John Potocki’s life is falling apart, and Colleen Greer is so worried about her boss’s health, she can hardly think. A young boy in Pittsburgh’s North Side neighborhood dies of a suspicious overdose. The Narcotics police are working on tips and they draft Colleen and Potocki to help them. In this same neighborhood, four young kids have been abandoned and are living on their own. The Philips kids, brainy in school, are reluctant to compromise themselves. But they need cash. Connecting these people and their stories is Nick Banks, just out of prison and working off a debt to an old acquaintance involved in the drug trade. Nick is a charmer, a gentle fellow who’s had a lot of trouble in his life. One day he gives free food to the Philips kids, little guessing how connected their lives are about to become.
Kathleen George’s latest work pushes the edge—a spectacularly original crime novel.
"George's fourth crime novel is a truly original tale featuring four amazing youngsters: they are resilient, resourceful, and responsible. This very modern police procedural will not be easily forgotten."--Library Journal
Kathleen George is the best selling author of a series of thrillers set in Pittsburgh where she lives and where she is a professor of theatre at the University of Pittsburgh. Her fifth novel HIDEOUT (August 16, 2001) has won high praise already. Her fourth, THE ODDS, just now out in paperback, was a finalist for an Edgar® award for best novel of the year in 2010. She is also the author of the acclaimed novels TAKEN, FALLEN, and AFTERIMAGE, the short story collection THE MAN IN THE BUICK, and the 2011 edited collection of stories, PITTSBURGH NOIR. Early on George Pelecanos wrote "I look forward to reading anything Kathleen George writes." An Entertainment Weekly reviewer wrote of THE ODDS, "If anyone is writing better police thrillers than George, I don't know who it is."
She is married to writer Hilary Masters, who asked her out twenty years ago because he figured she, a theatre director, would be interesting--he was tired of being around writers. On the first date, she told him she had begun writing (or more accurately had taken it up again, having said from the time she was seven that she wanted to be a writer).
He thought, "Oh, no, not another one." But they had already hit it off and so it was too late. Now there are two of them in one household, shuffling around in sloppy clothes, coffee cups in hand, heading to paper, computer, typewriter.
"When I was eight, I took my accumulated miseries up to the attic," she wrote in "The Making of a Writer" "where I had discovered I could make an area, (a small stage set?) with table, chair, notebooks and pen, and suddenly my world seemed whole and good--a secret and a treasure."
*******Detailed media bio and photos:
Kathleen George was born in Johnstown Pennsylvania. As a child, she wanted to be a writer. She wrote stories and plays in high school and in her undergraduate years as a creative writing major at the University of Pittsburgh. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in Theatre (also at Pitt). By then she had made her home in Pittsburgh. For eight years she taught theatre at Carlow College, where she directed many plays. Then she accepted a teaching position at Pitt where she continued to direct and teach dramatic literature and playwriting; in the early 80s, she began to add fiction writing back into the mix. In 1988, she earned an M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing (also at Pitt!) on the side. She is a Professor in the Theatre Arts Department.
Book-length fiction publications are: THE MAN IN THE BUICK, a collection of stories, BKMK press, 1999; TAKEN, a novel, Delacorte 2001; FALLEN, Dell 2004; AFTERIMAGE, St. Martin's Minotaur 2007; and THE ODDS, St. Martin's Minotaur 2009. TAKEN has been translated into French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Danish, and Norwegian. In August of 2011, HIDEOUT, a fifth novel, will launch. She is also the editor of the 2011 PITTSBURGH NOIR.
George has been granted fellowships at artists' colonies, including the VCCA and MacDowell. Her short fiction has appeared in journals and magazines which include Mademoiselle, Cimarron Review, North American Review, New Letters, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and one story was listed among the Distinguished in Best American Short Stories.
Her theatre publications are: Rhythm in Drama, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980, Playwriting: The First Workshop, Allworth Press, 2008 (first in print with Butterworth (Focal Press) 1994), and Winter's Tales: Reflections on the Novelistic Stage, University of Delaware, 2005.
She has taught for Pitt in London and has served as faculty and as Academic Dean for Semester at Sea. She has directed for Pitt's mainstage and for the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival productions which include The Rehearsal, The Country Wife, She Stoops to Conquer, The Winter's Tale, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, A Flea in Her Ear, and Our Town. A number of these productions were listed among the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Ten Best of the Year. She has also produced and sometimes directed over sixty original plays written by her students.
Chief Richard Christie is in the hospital with leukemia. He is due to begin chemo and his department is worried about him.
Four young children of the Phillips family are abandoned by their step-mother. Since their father had died a few years ago, the children are on their own. The eldest child is Meg, age fourteen. She and her brother and sisters are very industrious and don't want to ask for help because they fear they will be placed in forster homes. They do well in school and do what they can to provide food and enough money for the very basics.
Nick Banks is a new employee in the neighborhood pizza parlor. When Meg doesn't have enough to pay for her food, he gives them food at lower cost. He even gives some food for free telling Meg that it was a day old and he couldn't sell it.
A young boy is found dead from drugs and homicide detectives John Potocki and Colleen Greer are assigned to the case. Since the case involves drugs, they are placed under the Narcots department on a temporary basis. The police think that the pizza parlor might be a place where drug activity takes place, they want Colleen to go undercover, become friendly with Nick and see what she can uncover.
Nick is a former con and is obliged to help one of the drug enforcers. However, when that person wants to harm someone, Nick won't go along with it and as a result, he is badly injured.
What couldn't be forseen is the connection of Nick and the Phillips children. There is a beautiful relationship that shows how good people can be in a world surrounded by crime and greed.
The story is well told and the characters have such depth and charitable traits that they will be remembered long into the future. The author has given the reader a lesson of urban drugs and how that can take over a neighborhood. It depicts how easily it is for children to become involved in drugs and how difficult to maintain a drug free lifestyle.
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This was my first exposure to Kathleen George. What a pleasure! Complex, well-wrought characters (particularly the Phillips kids), interesting plot (not truly a mystery as the cover promises, but a crime story and character study), and evocative writing that really puts you in the mean streets of Pittsburgh. Highly recommended!
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The prose of George's new novel is spare, the images sharp, the characters sympathetic and completely believable. Her Pittsburgh is both beautiful and dangerous, and full of people that are unseen by the middle and upper classes, but who know exactly what the police need. I was completely caught up in the dual story lines of this novel, both of the children abandoned by a stepmother after their father has died, and the case that the police are trying to solve. This is a mystery novel with heart, sociological insight, and a rigorous plot. Highly recommended.
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