Just a reminder: Our old pal Will Clarke will be signing his new (to you, anyway) book The Worthy tonight at 7:30 at the Barnes & Noble Booksellers across the street from NorthPark Center, at 7700 W. Northwest Hwy. Clarke's a swell guy going places, or at least Hollywood. And a week from tonight, from 7 to 9 on July 17, Clarke's buddy and fellow local author (not to mention commercial real estate appraiser) Harry Hunsicker will have a kickoff party for his second Lee Henry Oswald mystery The Next Time You Die, the follow-up to his Shamus Award-nominated Still River. And it is a party: Hunsicker's holding his release not in a stuffy bookstore, but in the Cigar Bar at Javier's at 4211 Cole Ave., among the myriad local settings (Lee Harvey's, the Gingerman, Legal Grounds, the Time Out Tavern, the Galleria, etc.) for the in-stores-officially-tomorrow thriller about Baptist preachers, Texas politicians, crime kingpins and the pretty lady that always shows up in good books like these. Look: We like Hunsicker enough to forgive him the references to the "Olds 97 t-shirt" and The Dallas Morning News and D.
And to complete the local(ish) writer trifecta, we just got in the mail, moments ago, a copy of Tyler author Milton Burton's new mystery The Sweet and the Dead, in which "Manfred Eugene 'Hog' Webern, a retired Dallas County deputy sherrif, is talked into going undercover in Biloxi, Mississippi, in a multistate effort to nail a group of traveling Southern criminals who have been tagged by the press with the lurid name 'Dixie Mafia.'" (I believe Dixie Mafia's a dancer at The Lodge, no?) Burton's new one is a follow to The Rogues' Game, which was pretty good, as I recall. New one's full of references to local hotspots dearly departed. --Robert Wilonsky
