Coffin's Got the Dead Guy on the Inside
by Keith Snyder
from Dell
An edgy thriller that moves from the underground music scene of southern California to the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, Keith Snyder's latest is a return trip with Jason Keltner, a starving artist and composer of electronic music who's drawn into a world where reality is a construct that depends on the hardware that creates it. When multimedia guru Huey Benton dies at a party in front of Jason's eyes, it seems at first to be an alcohol-stimulated accident. But things are not always as they appear. Jason begins to suspect that Paul Reno--the computer genius he's been asked to watch--may be involved in the death. All Jason really wants is to finish his latest composition and find a title for it, but when mysterious men start following him and threatening his life, not to mention his somewhat stalled career, he's forced to take a more active role in protecting a piece of computer hardware known as a dongle from people with no compunctions about committing murder to get their hands on it. Coffin's Got the Dead Guy on the Inside is an interesting take on a part of the music world that will be new to many readers. It is written by a multimedia designer, composer, and filmmaker who introduced his unlikely hero in Show Control. --Jane Adams
Trouble Comes Back
by Keith Snyder
from Walker & Company
This is the third in a series about three mystery-solving friends in Southern California. Trouble Comes Back pits sleuth Jason Keltner and his buddies Robert and Martin against a drug dealer; a rocker named Uncle Trouble, and a little girl.
The Night Men: A Jason Keltner Mystery (Jason Keltner Mysteries)
by Keith Snyder
from Walker & Company
The situation has to be desperate to cause a California guy to ride his bike across the Brooklyn bridge at midnight, in a snowstorm. But that's exactly what Jason Keltner was doing because of the phone call he'd received, as chilling as the wind he was riding into, as frightening as memories that haunted as nightmares.
Jason's friend Zeb, a fellow musician, had opened a music store in Brooklyn and someone had trashed it. The reasons were unclear, but one possibility came to mind: gay bashing. Jason knew the taste of violent prejudice too intimately to do anything but come out to help, to stay up nights as a watchman. It was something he'd done before; it was what brought him together with Robert and then Martin as high school students in California...and what brought Robert to Brooklyn now to help Jason now--without question, without limits, but with a bitter taste that would never go away.
Weaving past and present, The Night Men traces the evolution of a friendship forged in fear and investigates crime born of the same kind of blind hatred that had stalked three boys years earlier. The lessons they'd learned then hadn't been forgotten. The only difference was that now they knew what they were doing.
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